E538 Dr. Gabor Maté

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von – Episode E538: Dr. Gabor Maté

Date Released: October 15, 2024

In Episode E538 of "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von," host Theo Von engages in a profound and introspective conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté, a renowned physician and author. The discussion delves deep into topics such as trauma, addiction, developmental psychology, and the pervasive impact of a toxic culture on mental and physical health. Drawing from Dr. Maté's latest work, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, the episode offers listeners valuable insights into understanding and addressing the root causes of societal and personal dysfunctions.

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1. Introduction to Dr. Gabor Maté

Theo Von introduces Dr. Gabor Maté, highlighting his expertise in stress, trauma, addiction, and developmental psychology. Dr. Maté's new book challenges conventional notions of normalcy, illness, and healing within the context of a culture rife with toxicity.

Notable Quote:

"I'm grateful today to spend time with Dr. Gabor Maté, shine that light on me." – [Theo Von, 00:00]

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2. Defining Trauma

Dr. Maté begins by clarifying what constitutes trauma, distinguishing it from general stress. Trauma, he explains, originates from unhealed emotional wounds sustained during childhood, leading to long-term physiological and psychological repercussions.

Notable Quotes:

"Trauma literally comes from the Greek word for wound or wounding." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 07:13]
"Loneliness is both an outcome of trauma and a cause of tremendous stress." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 21:09]

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3. Societal Manifestations of Trauma and Addiction

The conversation transitions to the pervasive nature of trauma in modern society. Dr. Maté underscores alarming statistics, such as 70% of American adults being on at least one medication and the rising rates of mental health challenges among children. He draws parallels between trauma and addiction, emphasizing that addictions are not merely about substances but are profound responses to deep-seated emotional pain.

Notable Quotes:

"The number of children being diagnosed with all manner of dysfunctions... keeps going up." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 04:17]
"Addiction is manifested in any behavior... not just drugs." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 48:11]

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4. Personal Challenges and Healing

Dr. Maté shares his personal journey, revealing struggles with work addiction and compulsive shopping. He candidly discusses how unprocessed trauma from his childhood, including anti-Semitism and the separation from his mother during infancy, shaped his adult behaviors and relationships.

Notable Quotes:

"I'm like a puppet on a string... And I was successful, but unhappy." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 30:08]
"I was addicted to self-pity... Always seeing myself as less than." – [Theo Von, 58:27]

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5. The Role of Compassion and Self-Compassion

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the importance of self-compassion in healing trauma. Dr. Maté highlights that many individuals blame themselves for their struggles, neglecting the profound impact of their early experiences. He emphasizes the necessity of recognizing one's inherent worth without the incessant need to prove it.

Notable Quotes:

"It's not that you felt you were gross, it's... you believed you were not lovable." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 65:26]
"Self-compassion is recognizing that you're a hurt human being, not a 'shit' person." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 75:03]

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6. Impact on Relationships

Both Theo and Dr. Maté explore how unprocessed trauma affects personal relationships. They discuss challenges in trust, authenticity, and the pervasive fear of rejection, which often leads to dysfunctional dynamics in marriages and other partnerships.

Notable Quotes:

"If I'm in the environment where the parents can't do that... it's trauma." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 10:08]
"Comedians often develop their humor as a way to seek attention and validation." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 10:25]

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7. Cultural and Societal Structures

Dr. Maté critiques modern Western society's detachment from communal and nurturing practices. He contrasts indigenous communal upbringing with the isolated, stressed parenting prevalent today, arguing that the latter fosters a culture of disconnection and emotional isolation.

Notable Quotes:

"We've gone so far away from our nature when it comes to how we rear children." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 13:39]
"Civilization has brought many amazing things, but we've lost touch with our hearts." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 119:36]

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8. Healing and Moving Forward

The conversation shifts towards pathways for healing, emphasizing the integration of mind and body. Dr. Maté advocates for compassionate community support, therapy that addresses trauma, and a reconnection with indigenous wisdom to foster a more holistic approach to health.

Notable Quotes:

"We need to reconnect with those parts of ourselves that we've got divorced from." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 131:10]
"Heal yourself by understanding and addressing your trauma, not just suppressing symptoms." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, various timestamps]

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9. Conclusion: Hope and Human Potential

Despite the bleakness of current societal issues, Dr. Maté expresses optimism about humanity's inherent goodness and capacity for healing. He believes that with conscious effort and compassionate support, individuals and societies can overcome the entrenched patterns of trauma and addiction.

Notable Quotes:

"I believe in human beings. There's an essential goodness there." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 109:54]
"There's so much potential to be angels." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 109:54]

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Final Thoughts

Episode E538 is a compelling exploration of the intricate ties between childhood trauma, addiction, and societal dysfunctions. Dr. Gabor Maté provides a nuanced perspective, weaving personal anecdotes with scientific insights to offer a roadmap for healing and fostering a healthier, more compassionate culture. Listeners gain a deeper understanding of the profound impacts of unprocessed trauma and the vital importance of self-compassion and community support in the journey towards wholeness.

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Notable Quote with Attribution and Timestamp:

"We're born with emotional needs that we're just expected to meet, but we often fail to do so because of societal stress and disconnection." – [Dr. Gabor Maté, 08:38]

Transcript

[Theo Von]

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of angie. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well, from roof repair to emergency plumbing and more done well. So the next time you have a home project, leave it to the pros. Get [e-mail] we have some upcoming tour dates there in Colorado Springs in Colorado, Casper, Wyoming, Billings, Montana and Missoula, Montana, Bloomington, Indiana, Columbus, Ohio, Champaign, Illinois. Over there in a fighting Illini area, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Lafayette, Louisiana and Beaumont, Texas. You can get all your [e-mail] TOR and thank you so much for the support. Today's guest is a physician and an author. His works explore such topics like stress, trauma, addiction, developmental psychology, and more. He has a new book called the Myth of Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. I'm grateful today to spend time with Dr. Gabor. Mate, shine that light on me.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I'll.

[Theo Von]

Sit and tell you my stories.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Shine I know.

[Theo Von]

And I will find A song I will sing.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I saw your interview with Donald Trump.

[Theo Von]

Oh, you did?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And I was actually quite struck. I saw the segment on his brother's alcoholism.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And I found him unusually without bombast and almost tender and very vulnerable and just kind of humble, you know, which is not how usually he comes across.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Yeah. I was trying to just talk to him about something that felt pretty normal, you know.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. But he's also expressed interest in you and. And your brother and.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, I thought it was sweet of him.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

As sweet as he could be.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

You know, I think I.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, look, when you read further in the book, I actually talk about him.

[Theo Von]

Really?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

His childhood trauma. Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Oh, you do?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Him and Hillary Clinton's both.

[Theo Von]

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Oh, that's cool.

[Theo Von]

I'm looking forward to that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. I just. Yeah. It's like, especially, like, just as a regular person in the world, you kind of. You want to try to get a feel for somebody.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I use a poster boy for trauma.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

In my view.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. I. I wouldn't. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot. If there's a lot of it there. I mean, his brother had addiction and, like. And even him, I think, trying to learn about addiction. I wish I could. I wish I would have stayed in that conversation a little bit more with Donald and. And tried to share some thoughts and things that I had. Not thoughts, but a little bit more explanation about addiction from my own perspective.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Wow. That would have been an interesting conversation.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Just to let him know that it wasn't something his brother like. It wasn't like his brother just couldn't stop drinking.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No.

[Theo Von]

You know that he had other things inside of him that prevented him from doing that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Exactly.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. And I really wish that if I could go back, but the. One of the things that's been tough for me is just you get into certain conversations and I'm still learning how to be in conversations sometimes. So sometimes it's, you know, you're learning. You know, you're learning on the stove.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

We're always learning.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Yeah. We're always learning. Gabor. That's how you say it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Gabor.

[Theo Von]

Gabor.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Theo, Nice to meet you today, Mr. Mate. And thanks for coming.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Thank you. My pleasure.

[Theo Von]

Yep. And thanks for sharing this book, man. This is your book. The Mythonormal Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

You believe that we are kind of a sick culture. What makes you believe that? Well, or like, what proof do you have of that?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, so 70% of American adults are at least on one medication. 70%, 40% are on two medications or more. The number of children being diagnosed with all manner of dysfunctions, disorders, mental health challenges like adhd, self cutting, addictions, anxiety, depression, childhood suicide keeps going up. In the United States annually, twice as many people die of overdoses as died in the Iraq, Vietnam and Afghan wars put together. This is every year. Wow. The life expectancy, particularly of white men, has gone down due to suicide and drug overdoses. I mean, I could go the number of autoimmune, I could go on. On it forever. But just statistically, there's more and more evidence of illness and dysfunction.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the overdose and alone is unbelievable. You know, the fact that that's, that that's even just become a common thing in our society is. It's heartbreaking for so many. It's heartbreaking for so many and so many people's families. Just the residual effect of suicide or overdose. It's like we don't. Those numbers don't even take into the ripple effect of people losing a loved one, you know?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Absolutely. I mean, the families that are being devastated and I mean, I used to work with what is North America's most concentrated area of drug use in Vancouver, British Columbia. And I know you were there a month ago.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, we went down on Catchings. Is that right? Hastings. Hastings, yeah, we went down on Hastings just to take a drive and see.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, so that's where I used to work.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

For 12 years as a physician and everybody down there was severely traumatized in Childhood and their addictions were all a response to immense emotional pain that they didn't know how else to handle. Not to mention the racial aspect. Like, 30% of my clients were indigenous, whereas they only make up 5% of the Canadian population. So the more you suffer either socially or. Or individually, the more likely you are to escape in the soothing and the relief that drugs or other addictions offer. So if you look at American society, you really got to be asking, why are so many people having to escape from reality?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. And we're going to get into good stuff. I have a good plan today. I'm prepared some stuff. I have some questions that I even wrote down that are on cards just because I want to make sure that we get the best information that we can for our guests today. I think it's really important. One of the things that you talk about in the book that's causing a lot of sickness is trauma. And then more specifically, unprocessed trauma.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Help me define those a little bit for our audience.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Sure. So trauma is one of these words that everybody throws around.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, it's a buzzword.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So let's just define it. So trauma literally comes from the Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is a wounded, whether it's a physical wound or a psychological wound. In this case, we're talking about emotional wounds that haven't healed. So trauma is an unhealed wound that you sustain in childhood, but then it stays with you and it directly causes inflammation in the body. It affects how your genes function, how your chromosomes function. It stresses your organs. It creates all kinds of physiological problems on emotional levels. It instills a lot of pain in you that you try to escape from. And one of the ways you try to escape, for example, is through drug use or to other kinds of addictions or through self cutting or bulimia or any, you know, pornography or whatever. It also makes you suppress, disconnects you from your own emotions. Because when a child is being traumatized, it's too painful to connect to themselves, so they disconnect. And that disconnect then causes all kinds of problems in terms of illness, mental and physical. So the impacts of trauma are vast and quite under recognized indeed.

[Theo Von]

And you talk about trauma also as not being seen and known.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So here we have to understand what are the needs of the human child. So everybody understands that the child needs to be physically cared for, cleaned up, fed and sheltered and so on. Children, according to evolution, also have emotional needs that they're born with. One of them is being Just accepted and valued for exactly who they are and being seen rather than being forced to be something that the parents want them to be.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And a lot of parents in this society, not because they don't love their kids, but because they're so stressed, have just a hard time seeing their kids. I had trouble seeing my kids.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And that had an impact on them. And not because I wasn't devoted, because I didn't love them, just because. Because of my own trauma, I could even see myself.

[Theo Von]

Oh, man. I can relate so much to it. I can relate so much to that. Yeah. It's like. It's funny because I work as a comedian, and for, like, I grew up in a kind of a traumatic home. Like, my. My mom was very busy. We had. She had four children. And. Yeah. I feel like she never looked at me. I feel like she never kind of put her hands on me. I feel like she just. And she didn't know how. I guess, you know, it's okay. Yeah. I just always felt like I wasn't seen.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And how do. And how do you suppose that affected you?

[Theo Von]

Well, I ended up being. Becoming a comedian. I felt like I started. I had to find some way to be seen. I had to do something, you know, to get someone to see me, because I needed to survive, you know, I needed to feel alive, you know?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, it's funny about comedians. May I say something about them?

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I looked at the biographies of a number of comedians. What you're talking about is, like, a common theme. I looked at Robin Williams, who's this brilliant, brilliant comic. And one of the reasons he developed his humor was to make his mother laugh as a way of having his mother pay attention to him. Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer, the same thing.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So that they had the innate talent, but then they used that talent to be seen and valued where they should have been valued, with or without talent, no matter what. Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, it's funny. A few years ago, I thought, it's like I'm kind of a late bloomer. Like, I only realized that, like, I go to recovery meetings and stuff like that. I'm in aa, and I only realized a few years ago, it started to hit me. Like, did I even want to be a comedian? Or did I just at some early point develop having to get attention?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Because I need, you know, and then. So if that's the case, then who did I really want it? What? You know, who would. What would I have been if I didn't do that? And not saying that. Not saying that. I'm not grateful and I don't love being a comedian.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

It's been. It's been a blessing. But it's like, if I created that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Okay. I have to be this thing to. For you to see me. Then who created that? You know, like, who. Like, was there a different me that was supposed to be there, but then I created this?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, that's the dilemma for so many of us is that as a result of childhood wounding, we have to make ourselves into something that the world will accept and value. Like, look, in my case, I love having been a physician, and that's my calling. But the big part of it wasn't just that I wanted to help humanity or heal people. It's also needed to be important. Now, why did I need to be important? Because as an infant, I got the message that I wasn't.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And so now, then. And that creates a kind of an addiction because you have to keep proving to yourself how important you are and how valuable you are. But nobody should have to prove how valuable they are. That's just our birthright, that we exist. We have the right to be here.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. That God chose us or that the energies of the world chose us and said, I'm going to put you here like a. With a fine pen. I'm going to put you in the world. And I did it on purpose. And the world, it was built to take care of you and to nurture you and to make you feel welcome as you are.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And if you actually look at. And this has been studied quite extensively, how indigenous people or tribal peoples close to the land rear their kids. That's exactly how they rear their kids. Like, they gave their children a deep sense of acceptance. They hold them. They carry them everywhere.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah. All the paintings you see of Native Americans, they always. Somebody's got a kid on them. They got them in a knapsack. They got them. Right. They got them.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And they tend not to hit their kids.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. You never seen a movie about a Native American beating his children, I don't think.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so what you're describing is actually how we evolved. And part of the toxicity, in my view of our culture is we've gone so far away from our nature when it comes to how we rear children. And again, not because of lack of parental devotion, but because of so much parental stress.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think that was it. My mom couldn't see us because she had other things she had to see first.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And you know, and. Yeah, and not just me, but so many people, it's like, yeah, we've created a society or our society has created a way of life where now it's like both parents work in so many cases. So.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And that alone just feels like it just shouldn't be that way. It's like, by the way, if you look at.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Throughout evolution, through millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, children were always with their parents. That's how nature designed it. Now, if that's not possible in today's society, at least they may have to compensate for it. But we've forgotten that shouldn't need that.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So now when they send them to daycares and schools, it's all about behavior and it's all about fitting in, not about accepting the child and nurturing the child. Innate sense of who they are. So we all end up disconnected from ourselves. And then we get to a certain stage in life, we're wondering, whose life am I leading anyway?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And it's funny you say like, fitting in. It's like, yeah, like you're like your child's not fitting in because the. It's two puzzle pieces or the parents, you know, or the family. That's. And not to say it shouldn't be able to spend time with other children and be in. And that. That our schools are bad or anything, but it's the fact that they need to fit in there first. And then I think it's probably easier for children to fit in in other places in the world.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, that's. But the fitting in happens naturally when you're accepted. You know, listen, the schools. I'll tell you something. One of the. I'm talking science here. One of the essential needs of all mammals is play. In our brain, there's circuitry for play. You can see it. Dolphins play, Little elephants play. Bear cubs, lion cubs, puppies, kittens, they all play. Why? Play is essential for brain development. It's far more important than academic learning. So then the schools, there ought to be a lot more play, a lot more freedom for the kids to be themselves, a lot more freedom to move around. And then those kids will be naturally curious and interested in learning. But here we try to put the cart before the horse. We try and stuff them full of knowledge, skills and behavior or control, rather than, again, promoting the conditions for healthy brain development. So the schools, actually, they intend well, but they really don't get it when it comes to what do children actually need?

[Theo Von]

Well, I think it's Just an O. And that's just part of, it's like our whole society is. It's, you know, I wonder sometimes where we did we go completely off the rails in a direction and, or a series of directions, you know, that have kind of put us where we are. I want to get this statement right, right here.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Sure.

[Theo Von]

Why is a trauma event different from other stressful events? Like what makes it a trauma? Like some events could be traumatic for some people and the same event not traumatic for others. What exactly is it about the mind, body, soul that makes the event traumatic? Or like what is the mechanism?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Right, great question. So every traumatic event is stressful, but not every stressful event is traumatic. So you invite me on your show and for some reason I don't show up and you had this studio arranged that might stress you, but it doesn't traumatize you. It doesn't leave you with a permanent wound. So it's traumatic if it leaves you with a wound and if that wound leaves you more constricted and more afraid and more suspicious and less comfortable with yourself, more hostile to other people, less comfortable in the world, then it's traumatic. No, not every stressful event will have that effect. But if it does, then it's traumatic.

[Theo Von]

If it makes a wound.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

If it makes a wound, that makes it traumatic.

[Theo Von]

Because a wound is sensitive. Even if you think of a wound and if it's not healed properly, then it's always a problem.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, there's two. Yeah, and there's two ways a wound can show up. One is just an open wound and if you touch it. Oh. So I have certain emotional wounds and well into my 70s or even I'm 80 now, you know, same idea.

[Theo Von]

You look great.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, thanks. It's all the botox and the adrenaline. No, it's. And in my, in my 55 year old marriage with my wife, she might say something or react in some way that touches an old wound and all of a sudden I'm not this 80 year old guy, I'm this one year old kid responding, you know, because that wound is sort of. I'm not giving an excuse here. No, I'm just saying that that's the challenge, you know. So in one sense, a wound is a trauma, is an open wound that you touch it. Ow. That's the one thing. But then the other thing that happens to wounds is they scar over. Now scar tissue is thick, it's hard, it doesn't grow, it has no nerve ending. So it's insensitive. So we get hardened.

[Theo Von]

You can either get extremely sensitive or.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Very hardened, or both. Or both, depending on, you know. And when you talk about hardened criminals, guess what hardened them is that they were so wounded in childhood. Again, I'm not making excuses. I'm just telling you what the science shows.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And so then the question is, then, how do we treat each other in a society where so many of us carry wounds?

[Theo Von]

Let's talk a little bit about unprocessed trauma. So you talk about emotional isolation as being something that really negatively nurtures unprocessed trauma.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So once you're hurt as a child, you tend not to trust other people. So you could be in the middle of a crowd and be laughing and interacting, but still feel quite alone emotionally. Maybe you've had that feeling.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and that emotional isolation itself then has effects on your body and on your mind. So the people who are lonely, and the US Surgeon General, Dr. Admiral Vivek Murthy, just issued a paper on loneliness in the United States and loneliness. And there's an epidemic of loneliness. People are describing us as lonely in much higher numbers as they did 20, 40 years ago. No, loneliness is as much of a risk factor for physiological illness as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

[Theo Von]

Really?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So loneliness is both a manifestation of trauma and a cause of tremendous stress, which then undermines physiological and mental health.

[Theo Von]

Okay, say that to me one more time. So.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So loneliness is both an outcome of trauma.

[Theo Von]

So it's an outcome of trauma. So something traumatic happened. It wasn't processed properly. And then now you. You will feel lonely.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You will feel lonely. You will isolate. Because, look, if I. I'm always being a nice guy so that you will like me, but inside I'm feeling all these emotions that I'm not sharing with you. That's pretty lonely. Even though you might like me because I'm showing you this nice side of myself, right?

[Theo Von]

That's not really me.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's not me. There was a study done in Australia, or at least I used to work in palliative care as a doctor looking after dying people. In Australia, there was a palliative care nurse who wrote a book called the Top Five Regrets of Dying People. These are people that were dying before their time, like I used to look after of cancer or chronic neurological illness. You know what the top regret of dying people was? That they didn't have the courage to be themselves. And the third top regret was that they didn't have the courage to express their emotions. They pretended to be happy when they were not, and so on. So the question for the rest of us is do we want to wait till some terminal illness wakes us up, or should we just confront the fact that in so many ways we're afraid to be authentic because we're so afraid of being rejected? And as children, we didn't have much choice. As adults, can we develop that freedom to be ourselves?

[Theo Von]

Wow. Yeah. It's like. Yeah. It's amazing what your feelings or your heart or your mind will, like, want you to do sometimes. But then this other smoke comes in this.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

That feels stronger. Yeah, sometimes. And it. It clouds. It almost clouds the. That feeling away.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

You know?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, it does.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And. And. Am I interrupting? Sorry.

[Theo Von]

No, I just wanted to. You said that in the book that if you have a trauma that you can't process, you essentially have the trauma of unprocessed trauma.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

So now you've had a trauma that's happened.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And then if you can't process it now, you have almost a new trauma of. Of unprocessed trauma.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, that's. They have the ongoing wound, which is what trauma means. Now, look, let's take an extreme example.

[Theo Von]

Okay.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Let's say a child is being sexually abused. So what would their instincts tell them to do? Well, their instincts would say fight back or run away or ask for help, for God's sakes. But by definition, none of those options are available to the child. So the only way they can survive is to disconnect from themselves. And that disconnection then gets wired into the nervous system, into their brain. And every time they even think of being themselves, as you just described, they get scared because being themselves, because had they fought back, had they tried to escape, it would have even worse for them. So that disconnection from the self was the only way they survived. Now every time, as an adult, even think of being authentic, that fear comes up.

[Theo Von]

And it may not even come up for them, like, in their awake mind. It's almost like it comes up at a level where you don't even realize, like, that something's pulling the strings in the distance. That's what's pretty remarkable.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, pulling the strings is exactly the right analogy. There's a neurobiologist, neuroscientist, quite well known at Stanford University, Robert Sapolsky, who wrote a book recently called Determined, by which he means predetermined. He basically says there's no such thing as free will because we're so conditioned by our biology, our culture, and our early experiences. And he's almost right, because what he's talking about is as you say, we're pulled by these invisible strings of our unconscious that were programmed into us even before we were born, even in the mother's wombs. And so it's just a life. I find it, personally, a lifetime's challenge to cut the strings and to actually be in the present moment as an adult person, connected to myself. Let me tell you, it's a lifelong's work.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, yeah. No, I feel you. It's funny. Like, I didn't even know that. I didn't know that might sound crazy. I didn't even I existed and everything was fine in my life. But, yeah, I was having trouble, like, building relationships. There were just things that I didn't have any real tools to. To make my life evolve. And so I started to think, well, what is going on here? And then, you know, with a lot of therapy and different modalities of therapy, I went more into, like, my past and I started to see, like. Oh, I see.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

It's because of these, you know, these things that have happened and then I never process them, that some of them are still pulling me back, you know, some of them are still holding me.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And until you did process them, what freedom did you actually have?

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You were like puppets on a string.

[Theo Von]

Oh. And. Yeah. And. And I was almost a figment of. It's funny, people say a figment of your imagination. That's almost what I was. Sometimes I felt like I was something that my mind or that my soul or whatever I created to best face Persona. Yes.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Did you ever read Pinocchio as a kid?

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah. Geppetto dude.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, do you remember what. When Pinocchio becomes a real boy and he looks at his puppet self and he says, I was so foolish when I was a puppet. But we're also foolish when we're puppets. We're not stupid.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But we're unaware.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Unaware, man. I've been taking this all weekend when I'm touring on the road and in and out of buses and airports and stuff, I get dehydrated. That's why I use Liquid iv. You can just get some water and you crack open a packet, put it in there. Bam. Hydrate yourself. There's so much to love about Liquid IV's new hydration multiplier and immune support. Mango passion fruit flavor. With five times the daily value of vitamin C and three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drink. You can give your body the immune support it needs while treating yourself to a taste of the tropics support everyday wellness with Liquid IV. I do. Get 20% off your first order of Liquid IV when you go to liquid IV.com and use code THEO at checkout. That's 20% off your first order when you shop. Better hydration today using promo code [e-mail] every device we use is getting smarter. Your watch can now tell the time but also tell you how many steps you've taken. The world keeps getting smarter. Your e commerce business should too. Whether you're looking for incredible efficiency or your business has outgrown your old shipping solutions, Shipstation helps you take the next step. Shipstation helps you achieve exceptional shipping efficiency with a robust all in one order fulfillment system that integrates with over 180 of the most popular e commerce platforms, marketplaces and carriers. Deliver a better customer service with industry leading features that help you find the best carrier rates, print labels and make customer service a breeze. Lead your e commerce business into a smarter future with the shipping software that delivers. Switch to ShipStation today. Go to ShipStation.com and use code Theo to sign up for your free 60 day trial. That's shipstation.com code theo. Let's personalize this a little bit. So what was the trauma in your life that started you on this journey?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, what started me on the journey was well into adulthood. For a long time I didn't realize I was traumatized just like you didn't. I just was a puppet on the string in some ways, you know, And I was successful. I was a well respected family doctor. But I was unhappy. I felt I had potential that I hadn't even nearly touched. And I had no idea how to get there. My marriage had difficulties, a lot of tension. My children were facing their challenges and in some ways they were even afraid of me, you know, and like afraid of your energy? Afraid of like afraid of my sudden outbursts of uncontrolled. I don't mean physical violence. Yeah, I mean just outbursts of rage, you know, Anger. Yeah, I can relate to that. And my son Daniel, who helped me write the Myth of Normal, he says in the book that the floor was never the floor. He never knew when the floor might disappear. In other words, when the loving and devoted and playful parents might all of a sudden erupt in one of their dramas. And the kids are there watching this hurricane sweep through the house. Emotionally speaking. Well, that doesn't create a basis of trust or security. And it's not because we didn't love our kids. It's not because we didn't do our Best, you know, so looking at all that, at some point I had to start asking, like, you had to start asking, well, what's going on here? And that's when I started looking at what happened to me as a kid.

[Theo Von]

What were you like as a kid?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

What was I like? Yeah, I was very smart.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah, I've heard you say. I've heard you refer to yourself as smart child.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

You like to rebel.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I was a rebel. Yeah. In. In communist Hungary, you really had to follow the rules. And the teacher at some point sent a warning to my parents saying that he better watch it because he agitates his classmates. Yeah, I loved getting those, you know, I was very. I was very thoughtful. I wet my bed till I was 13, dude.

[Theo Von]

I wet my bed, I think, till I was 26.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, wow. Okay. And that does go back to childhood trauma, early childhood trauma.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

When I was 8 years old, my mother took me to a psychologist, and psychologist took my history, you know, Jewish infant born under the Nazis or living my first year under the Nazi occupation and all the horrors. And then the separation from my mother for six weeks. And she said. He said to my mom, madam, if the only problem this kid has is that he wets his bed, you're very fortunate. Well, I can tell you that's not the only problem that I had. So on the one hand, I was highly functioning, but on the other hand, I had all this unseen stuff that erupted later on.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. It's funny, you don't even know it's there. Especially when you're a kid. You don't know.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You don't know.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, you don't know. You don't know that it's there. And then later, you have to. It's almost like a fire that starts when you're young, but you don't. The smoke doesn't show up. For me, it wasn't until my 30s, and I was like, where the is all this smoke coming from?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's exactly right. That's what happened to me.

[Theo Von]

And then I had to go back and look at it. Yeah, it's like. Yeah, unprocessed trauma. It's like. Yeah, it's like a fight. Like, imagine starting a fire, but no smoke comes out of it. Yeah, that's unprocessed trauma.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, the.

[Theo Von]

Does that make sense or it doesn't?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, it makes total sense. Because what happens is like when you said earlier, you're fine. The heck you were fine. You thought you were fine.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And that's because we push down all the rage that we never expressed as kids. We pushed on the pain, we pushed on the isolation. We pretend. And we can function in the world in ways that the world can even respect and reward at this. I mean, look at. We're talking here in Hollywood. Look at all the figures here that were great successes, idols to millions, and they had these miserable inner lives. I mean, you can list 100 of them.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, I got 50 of them in my phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. I mean, it's. And it's. Yeah. It's funny that if things. If. If it's not the foundation isn't there, then you'll go find it in the world. Right. And. And sometimes what you go find, even though you're just trying to replicate what you didn't get when you were young, that's detrimental to you, which is why.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

People get into unhealthy relationships. Because where did we most want love when we were kids? When we most wanted to be seen? By whom? By the people that couldn't do it. Therefore, we will repeatedly look for people who can't see us and hoping that this time they will.

[Theo Von]

They will.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, it's so funny. I have this. I have this thing that came into my head like I could jump off of a cliff, right?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

But if I heard a mom come home from work back on the top of that cliff, I would find a way to get. Or if I heard, like, high heels, if I heard a woman's footsteps, I'd find a way to get back up there and. And look towards her.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Because you look for the mom.

[Theo Von]

Because I'm just. Yeah. It's like. It may sound crazy, but. Yeah, just like. Yeah. It's like if I can't help but look, I can't help but wonder, does. Is that woman accept me? You know, even with dating and all my relationships, I see it now. It's like, you know, I'm always kind of. I'm even. Even in just any relationship. I'm just. Or any moment, I'm just looking. Do you accept me? I can feel this. Do you accept me?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. You know, And. And unfortunately, it really gets in the way of male female relationships.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Because a lot of us, I mean, myself included in my relationship with my spouse, in some ways, I just wanted to be mothered, you know, not just loved as an adult, but actually mothered on the one hand. On the other hand, I would resent it, you know, because I don't want to be controlled.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, so it puts the woman into an impossible Situation.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah. I would never. Date me.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Oh, jeepers. Yeah. I wouldn't.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Even now, I.

[Theo Von]

It's getting better. But it's still.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

We.

[Theo Von]

Still. We're. It's getting better.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

You know. Yeah. Those relationships are tough, you know? Yeah. I have trouble committing in a relationship. You know, I did. I did. I did some ayahuasca ceremonies. People do plant medicine.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, hey, you haven't read the chapter yet on ayahuasca.

[Theo Von]

There's one in here.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, yeah?

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Chapter. I think it's chapter 31.

[Theo Von]

So you had experience with it?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I used to lead retreats with it.

[Theo Von]

No way, bro.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. And what were you gonna say? What were you gonna say about it?

[Theo Von]

I was gonna say that when I. When I did a plant medicine retreat, that I realized one of the reasons why I've had trouble getting relationships is because I'm still waiting for this original relationship.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The perfect mom.

[Theo Von]

Yep. And it' no blame. It's not a blame on my mom. I don't. I don't do that. I don't do that anymore. I lament some of the feelings from my youth, but I don't. You know, I love my mother, and I'm grateful that she did the best that she could, and I believe that she did. But. Yeah, I realized, like, I can't. There's just a part of me that is just still, like. I feel like it's like a kid, like, standing on a dock, like, waiting for a boat to come. That's how I envision a lot of times, but.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So there's a deep longing. Yeah, I totally understand that.

[Theo Von]

And then you try to get someone else to fill it, and they don't even know what to do. And you. And for years, I didn't even know I was trying to get somebody to fill it. It just. Nothing. I couldn't figure it out.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

There was that emptiness.

[Theo Von]

Oh, it was wild, man. And my life was still okay, but just below, right below the surface level of my life. There was. It was a precarious foundation.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I totally understand. I found out about ayahuasca after my book on addiction got published in 2009. It's called in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. And it's about how addiction is not a genetic disease. It's a response to trauma as it affects the brain and the psyche. But after I published that book, I go on book tourism, and people got asking me, what do you know about addiction and its healing with ayahuasca? I know nothing about it. Next visit, next stop. What do you know, about Leave me alone already. I mean, you just spent three years writing the book, and you're asking me about the one thing I don't know anything about. And then finally said, somebody said, you know, you could experience this up here in Vancouver because there's a Peruvian shaman who came up there. So I did the ayahuasca and I experienced pure love for the first time in my life. There's a little baby in the tent whose father had done a plant, and the mother was there with the baby, and the baby started cooing and oohing and gnawing, and these tears of love just flowed down my face, and my heart just opened. And I realized how closed my heart had been because it was so bruised so early that I closed it down. Not that I deliberately closed it down, but as a way of protecting it. And that right away he said, okay, I can work with this to help people who are addicted. Now, I'm not here to advocate its use. It's not for everybody. It's certainly not a panacea. You know, psychedelics is a whole other conversation.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, same. I'm not saying anybody should.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

They have their place. They're not the answer, and they're certainly not for everybody. But in the right context, with the right guidance, the right preparation, they can really help people open up to parts of themselves that they weren't even aware that they were there.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's fascinating, and I hope that. That the knowledge of that evolves over time, you know, but that can also be scary because some people go and get addicted to that. I've seen that happen with people, and.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I've seen it, too. Because what people get addicted to is not so much to substances, because nobody's going to get addicted to what's going on.

[Theo Von]

You can't just have some at a club.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But what they get addicted to is the heightened experience. And if they don't know how to integrate what they've learned into their lives, then they keep looking for that elevated experience that takes them out of their ordinary self. And so I really think that that's one of the risks of psychedelic use, is that you start looking for that elevated, heightened or deepened experience that's missing from your life, where the whole thing is the experience can open the door.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But you got to walk through it.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And you have to keep walking through it. Not when you're under the influence of the medicine.

[Theo Von]

Right. The integration.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The integration.

[Theo Von]

It's so key.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. We've lost. That's a huge part of our society that's kind of. Now we just kind of get a piece of information and then we're like, oh, we have the information, but we don't take as much time to. To integrate something in our life. Like, that's one thing I've noticed for myself anyway. I don't want to pin on everybody, but I'll notice that sometimes I'll learn something. I'll learn a fact or I'll learn, like, a way that I've. Oh, I know this about me now, or this is something I've learned. But unless I integrate the solution to that or the information from that, the positive information, instead of just shouting it out that I know it, actually integrating it and taking time to integrate it. Even taking time. Like if you go to a church sermon or a mosque sermon or synagogue sermon. Yeah, Jewish church. That's why I was thinking of synagogue sermon. But. And you can hear a message.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Right.

[Theo Von]

But then you can just go on about your day. But taking time to integrate a message in your life. Well, what did I hear? How does it make me feel?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's right.

[Theo Von]

What do I think about it? I think we used to have a lot more time to do that just because our society wasn't so. Our lives weren't so frenetic.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, I think we're addicted. Particularly, I think the United States is addicted to the quick fix.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. That Earl Shib.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

The paint. This spray paint it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Have you struggled with addiction before?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Have I struggled with addiction?

[Theo Von]

I know you struggle with work addiction. I think you talked about.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I had. I've had two major addictions. One is workaholism. And again, I have to make a distinction here. I mean, I did good work, and I did work that had meaning and made a contribution. That's good. That's the calling. But then there's another part of it which is being driven. I mean, you're being driven. You're not in charge. You, like, leave. Being driven by the wind. And I was driven to work because I have to keep proving my importance and that people should like me, people should respect me. And why? Because I didn't respect myself. And because I. I got this message early in life that I just wasn't important, you know, and I believed it. The trauma is not, for example. The trauma is not, for example, that my mother gave me to a stranger when I was 11 months old to save my life. That wasn't the trauma. That was a traumatic event. Trauma is what happens inside you. The trauma Inside me was that I concluded from that that I wasn't lovable, I wasn't important. Now that drives the work addiction, right? Because you have to keep proving to yourself. The other addiction I had, and people often laugh and hugging, called that an addiction, but really it was, was shopping for classical compact discs.

[Theo Von]

CDs.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

CDs.

[Theo Von]

Hell yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But, but I could drop three, four thousand dollars a day on them, you know, and I would.

[Theo Von]

You can't even smoke them.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, you can't smoke them. And no sooner would I leave the store, but I have to run back to get some more. So it wasn't about the having and the enjoying. I loved the music, but it wasn't about that. It was about getting more and more and more and never enough. And so I would lie to my wife about it. I would sometimes neglect my work. I mean, I don't think I mentioned this in this book, but in my book of addiction I talk about how I left a woman in labor once to go get a compact disc.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

What album was it that I don't remember anymore. I think it was a Mozart symphony, but I don't remember anymore. But so I'm talking about, I'm not talking about my passion, I'm not talking about my passion for music. I'm talking about my drivenness. And sometimes people say, well, how can you compare your addictions to your heroin addicted, cocaine addicted, HIV ridden clients? And I said, I don't. I said, the differences are obvious. It's the similarities that are interesting. And when I told my patients in the downtown east side who were using the heroin and, you know, and the cocaine and whatever that, you know, I.

[Theo Von]

Got these, these Boys II Men albums.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, yeah. And they said, they never said, how can you compare yourself? You know what they said, hey Doc, you're just like the rest of us, aren't you? And my point is, we are all just like the rest of us. We all find some chronic escape. Not all of us. Most people, whether it's drugs, pornography, sex, Internet, cell phones, gambling, there's so many gambling, self cutting, eating, shopping, running, working out.

[Theo Von]

That's a huge one.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Extreme working out and all that. And we're running away from ourselves.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And so, and when I ask people not what's wrong with your addiction, because that's obvious, but what's right about it? Like for example, I mean, you've had alcohol, drug issues. I've heard you say, what did they do for you in the short term?

[Theo Von]

I think it just, it gave me a break from how I Wanted to feel. It gave me a break from me.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It gave you a break from how you felt.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, yeah. It gave me a break from my feelings. Yeah, yeah. And it just gave me a break from me. I was just.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But that's because you were really uncomfortable with yourself.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And because you had feelings that were painful. So my mantra on addiction, which I mentioned in this book, is don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And if you understand why people have pain, don't look at their genes, look at their lives.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

What happened to them.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, yeah. You say. Or I've heard you in your book. You talk about addiction. If you recognize the harm it's. Or I think it might have been in a interview you did. If you recognize the harm it's doing and you keep doing it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So addiction is manifested in any behavior, image. A person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences and they don't give it up. So pleasure, craving, relief in the short term, harm in the long term, refusal and inability to let go of it. That's what an addiction is. So it's got nothing to do with drugs? Well, it could have to do with drugs.

[Theo Von]

Could have to do with any of the things we already mentioned, but.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Any of the things we mentioned and.

[Theo Von]

But why the pain? That's the question.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The question is why the pain?

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

What are we running away from?

[Theo Von]

Right. Yeah. I had like once I saw like pornography and stuff like that. It was like. And I could do masturbation or jerking off or whatever people call it. But once I. That was the first way that I realized, oh, I can make myself feel good.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And it was like the first time that I like, yeah, I could make myself feel good. And so then it just became. Yeah, it became a way that I always. I mean, I would just. And I would. But yeah, I would just that if the only way I knew how to make myself really feel good, even though it's just for a moment. Well, listen, I would take it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Should I tell you something scientific about that?

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So cocaine addicts and crystal meta addicts or any stimulant addicts, in fact all addicts amongst the things they're looking for is ahead of dopamine. Dopamine is the incentive motivation chemical in our brain. It's what makes us feel vital and alive and you know, ready to go. And without it, we can't survive. Now cocaine, crystal method.

[Theo Von]

Without it we can't survive.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, we can't.

[Theo Von]

That's cool to hear.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, no, because dopamine flows in the brain when we're exploring a novel object or a novel environment, when we're seeking food, when we're seeking a sexual partner. We can't survive without that stuff. You can take a mouse in the laboratory and put food in front of him and he's hungry, but he won't eat. Why? Because genetically you knocked out his dopamine receptors and he doesn't have the motivation, so it's the motivation chemical. It's absolutely essential. Now, cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, crystal meth, they literally give you a direct hit of dopamine. So does pornography. When you do a brain scans on people, pornography, they get repeated spikes of dopamine. It's not the pornography they're addicted to. It's that hit of dopamine that they get in their brains.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And all addictions, shopping. I mean, when I went to the record store, it was the dopamine. Like I've been diagnosed with adhd. It's the first book I wrote was on. Was on ADD and you know, spacing out, absent mindedness, you know, all this kind of stuff.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah. Daydreaming, they call it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. And. But when I was in the record store, I was present.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I was focused. I could almost remember which records I bought at which store at what time, you know, like.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Because the dopamine was flowing like crazy and that's why I needed to go back. It wasn't because I needed more music.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The trunk's full.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I was, I was after that. I was hiding the discs on the porch and in the attic so my wife wouldn't call me, you know, but. But I was after.

[Theo Von]

The ceiling caves in. It's just a bunch of Van Halen.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. And I was after that. Dopamine.

[Theo Von]

Dopamine. Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know. Which is what you're after with the pornography.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, yeah. Just was. And I was a way to make me feel good. And it was the first way that I could interact with a woman where it felt like I could. And I know it's not real interaction.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

But it was like, this is the safest closest I can get to interacting with a woman and it being like, okay. Because I would, I would get so nervous around women or like if women looked at me, I would like, yeah. My whole bot. Like, I just, I couldn't handle it. Yeah. But yeah, that dopamine is. It's interesting to hear. So, yeah. No matter what it is, it's the dopamine behind it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's a Dopamine. No. And there's another chemical that's involved in many addictions, like the heroin addicts or the opiate addicts, the fentanyl addicts. Those are opiates which come from the opium plant. But why do they work in the human brain? Why would an opium plant work in the human brain? Because we have receptors for them. We have molecules that receives the opiate molecule. Now why do we have receptors from a plant that grows in Afghanistan? We don't. We have receptors for our own internal opiates. So we have an internal opiate system and they are called endorphins. Endorphin means endogenous internal opiate.

[Theo Von]

So those are our endorphins. Are our own opiates.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Opiates.

[Theo Von]

So we manufacture our own opiates.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Not only we do plants, do animals, do everybody? No, the question is, what do the opiates do in the human brain? But they do a whole lot of things. But importantly, they relieve pain, physical and emotional pain, because pain is necessary for life. Otherwise I could smash my hand on this table.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, you jump out of a window and you wouldn't care.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But I also have some pain relief. That's the endorphins, number one. Number two, what they do is they give you a sense of pleasure and reward. So when people go. People go bungee jumping, they get this high level of endorphins. That's what they're after.

[Theo Von]

And that's why they keep doing wild stuff like that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's right. And the third thing is the most important. The endorphins help to make possible this little thing called love. And if you knock out the endorphin receptors of little mice in the laboratory, they will not cry for their mothers on separation. What would that mean in the wild? It would mean their death.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So endorphins connect people to each other, especially parents and children. And so.

[Theo Von]

So we're each other's opiates in a.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Way, we're each other's opiates, especially in a healthy parent child relationship. And they both have endorphins flowing in their brain when they look into each other's eyes.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And if, when I ask heroin addicts or opiate addicts and a sex trade worker, I asked once, what does the heroin do for you? She said, when the first time I did heroin, it felt like a warm, soft hug. What was she talking about?

[Theo Von]

Connection.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Connection, yeah. And in this book I talk about it. And so many of the addicts, like one, a very well known recovery leader and fearless Advocate is Jamie Lee Curtis. And she told me. Is she, she, she is. Oh yeah, she's a Big 12 stepper.

[Theo Von]

I didn't know that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, no, she's a huge 12 stepper and very, very forthright about. About her addictions and also her recovery.

[Theo Von]

Wow, that's fascinating. I'd love to talk with her. Yeah. I've seen her eating lunch in the Palisades before, Pacific Palisades before.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But she told me that what the opiates did for her give her a sense of warmth in the belly. That warmth is what we're all after.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That comes from human connection. And when we didn't have the connections we needed early in life, then we keep looking for that warmth from other sources. So these people that are addicted to opiates, that's what they're looking for.

[Theo Von]

A bunch of hug hunters.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

I want to go back a little bit to trauma and isolation and I wanted to ask, what is it about not being emotionally. About not being emotionally isolated that allows one to process a trauma?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So I did a day long event here in LA just the day before we were recording this and I worked with a woman called Kimberly Shannon Murphy, who was one of Hollywood's top stunt women. She just got a lifetime achievement award as a student.

[Theo Von]

Congratulations, Kim.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And she worked with Cameron Diaz and Uma Thurman and Tom Cruise and all these people.

[Theo Von]

A lot of hotties.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, she was sexually abused by her grandfather all throughout her childhood and adolescence. And of course the family was in denial. Nobody noticed it. If they noticed it, they kept silent about it. She was totally alone with it. So that's what induced the wound. And had she been able to talk to somebody and say, this is happening to me, please help me, she would not have been traumatized. So the trauma happens when a child suffers and has nobody to share that suffering with. Whether it's the extreme suffering or sexual abuse or the milder, you might say suffering or just not being seen for who you are, if you're alone with it, you can't process it. So what happens later on, to answer your question, when you meet somebody where you feel safe and now you can express what's happening with you, that's what helps to process the trauma.

[Theo Von]

Got it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So it requires compassion and safety. And ideally, I mean, I criticize the 12 step groups not for what they do, because I love what they do for what they don't do. I don't think they talk about trauma enough. That's my view. But a 12 step group, that's Properly run will offer you support and safety. So now you can share yourself and be seen by others.

[Theo Von]

Amen. Yeah, I mean, I've gotten even into like the intimacy disorder groups and those are a lot more potent with people talking about their emotional disorders and like, you know, traumas and things that happen. And it's not a crybaby group either. You know, like sometimes we talk about trauma, but I don't talk about it from like a crybaby place. I like to talk about it from like, this is important and it's important to learn about and I like to share what I learn about from it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, it's not about people victimizing themselves or trying to present them as victims, saying, this is what happened to me and it's my responsibility to learn from it.

[Theo Von]

That's the truth.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And it's my responsibility to grow from it, not to wallow and oh, look what happened to me and I can't help it. That's nonsense.

[Theo Von]

Oh, I'll tell you this, Mr. Mate, that a thing I realized I was addicted to a few years ago. Self pity.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And I didn't even know it. I kept always thinking, man, what's wrong with me? I have to fix this every day. It wasn't. Nothing was enough. I kept. And then I realized that even though it seemed like I was trying to make myself better, the truth was that I was always seeing myself as less than.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Because those things have to both be present at the same time. Because I can only get better if, you know, after there's not. I'm. I'm never enough. Well, by never being enough though, it. I'm trying to figure this out. Well, I got addicted to self pity. I got addicted to like.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Can I jump in with a thought?

[Theo Von]

Yes, please. Thank you. Dear God, please.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It did something for you. It took away responsibly from you. Human beings have a hard time taking responsibility. I mean, you know, I have a hard time taking responsibility. You know, we all have a hard time taking responsibility. So when you're in that self pity mode, you're suffering, but you don't have to take responsibility. I'm suggesting that's what it did for you.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, I think, yeah. Maybe there was a part of me that wanted to keep it around because it always let there be something wrong with me too.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's right.

[Theo Von]

You know, like if I never solve this, if I'm never enough, then there will always be something wrong with me.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Does that make any sense?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It makes sense because again, it. It takes away the challenge. Of growth.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I mean, we talk about growing pains. Growth is painful.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah. People go from damn seven inches to seven beats six and a half, six one or whatever.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. And emotional growth is also.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Painful. And so when we don't grow, at least we avoid the growing pains.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. I used to, whenever I used to smoke, I used to be like, part of me didn't want to quit smoking.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Because I wanted to have an excuse for why I wasn't doing other things.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Right.

[Theo Von]

That makes sense.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Makes total sense.

[Theo Von]

Little sense is enough. I'll take it. This episode is brought to you by Etsy.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, hear that?

[Theo Von]

Okay, thank you. Etsy knows these aren't the sounds of holiday gifting. Well, not the ones you're hoping for. You want squeals of delight, happy tears?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

How did you.

[Theo Von]

And spontaneously written songs of joy. I am so happy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, yeah.

[Theo Von]

Um, okay, the song needs a bit of work, but anyway, to get those reactions, make sure everyone on your list feels heard with handmade, handpicked and designed gifts from small shops on Etsy. Gifts like personalized jewelry, custom artwork, cozy style items, vintage pieces, and home decor to celebrate all of your favorite people and their specific kind of special. For original gifts that say I get you, Etsy has it. Does Blue Chew work? I can answer it. Yep, I chew on them than thing. Baby, get that diving board. Baby, make your own pool. If you're asking that question, does Blue Chew work? We want you to know that Blue Chew is putting their money where their mouth is by giving you a month free. Blue Chew is an online service that delivers the same active ingredients as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, but at a fraction of the cost and in a chewable form. Blue Chew. Once men rock hard, they told me that's the mission. They will not stop until every man is bricked up, till every 10 is pitched, until every rod is raised. Salute. Discover your [e-mail] and we've got a special deal for our listeners. Try Bluetooth free. When you use our promo code THEO at checkout, just pay $5 shipping. That's BlueChew.com promo code THEO. To receive your first month free, visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information. And we thank Blue Chew for supporting the podcast. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. When your mental clarity or your focus or your ability to process something in your life is not where it should be, if you're struggling showing up for your family or yourself, you may need therapy. I'VE gone. I recommend it. Better help can help. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself. So you can take off the mask. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com the today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L p.com theo and we thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. Oh yeah. What else did I want to talk to? Oh, this is really fascinating stuff here. So trauma fosters a shame based view of the self. Yeah, I'd love to talk a little bit about shame, man, because that was a huge part of my life.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, tell me about it.

[Theo Von]

I just felt ashamed of myself. Yeah, I felt ashamed of like. Yeah, I felt ashamed of how I looked. I felt ashamed of like my ears, my nose, my face, my. The way I stood. I felt. Yeah, I felt ashamed of my family, of my home. I just, I. Everything. I. I just felt a ton of it. I'm not, I'm not whining about it right now. I'm just thinking back. But yeah, I just felt a ton of shame. You know, I felt like. I felt like. I think I felt ashamed of who I was at like the first molecule, almost like the first cell of my, you know, the dirt under the roots. It felt like I just. There was a part of me that felt like I was me or anything that had to do with me was gross.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I understand.

[Theo Von]

You know, and I use the word gross because that's. It felt like gross.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Now, the only thing I'll say is it's not that you felt you were gross, it's. You believed you were right.

[Theo Von]

Yes. Yeah, you're right. I didn't feel it. It wasn't like a feeling on the surface of me. It was like a knot someone had tied a long time ago in the beginning of my time. And in there, it. In that knot. It was in there somewhere and I couldn't really even access it. It was a. Yeah, but shame. Yeah, I want to hear about shame. Did you feel it?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Theo Von]

How'd you feel?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, growing up in Hungary in Eastern Europe and I lived there until I was 13. There was a lot of anti. Semitism and my grandparents had died in Auschwitz. I almost died as an infant. My mother My father.

[Theo Von]

That's when your mother gave you to someone else to save you.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's right. Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

When I was 11 months of age. But even after the war, there was anti Semitism and so I'd feel ashamed of being Jewish. I don't anymore, but I did as a kid, so I would kind of. Then I'd have. I was ashamed of my Jewish looks.

[Theo Von]

Oh, so you have to hide or you have to feel like. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

There's something different about me that isn't quite right. And, you know, there was a lot of antisemitism and taunting in the school that I went to. You know, when I look back on it now. So. Yeah. And then I developed body shame. You know, I mean, to this day, it's kind of. It's interesting, but every day I judge aspects of my body.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, this is not big enough or this is too big or whatever, you know.

[Theo Von]

Yes, it's too big.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So shame, but shame. Nobody's born with shame, really. No infant is born ashamed of themselves. They're totally there.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, that's true. Huh. If you saw a little infant that was ashamed of yourselves, ashamed of himself, it would break your heart.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

No, they wouldn't even know how to do it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

How infants get shamed is when they're not seen and.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. And what happens then?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, then. Or if they're mistreated? Well, let's say a child is not seen or worse, is being hurt. That they can make two assumptions. One is these adults are stupid, they're incapable, they're incompetent. I'm all alone in the world. Or the child can believe there's something wrong with me and maybe if I can work hard enough, I can fix it. Now, which belief do you think is more acceptable for the child?

[Theo Von]

The second one.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The second one. So then they develop this deep sense that there's something wrong with us. We just have to work hard enough or look good enough or something and maybe we can fix. So even that shame which comes out from being cut off from. It comes from being cut off from human contact the way we need. It has a kind of protective value, really, because it makes us at least think that there's something we can do.

[Theo Von]

It almost. It gives us hope in a weird way.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It gives us hope in a weird way. Yeah, but it just. But here's the thing. Children are narcissists. Young children. When I say narcissists, I don't mean in the pathological sense. I mean in the sense they think it's all about them, Right?

[Theo Von]

And they don't have any other choice. They're all they know.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's all they know. So if the parents are happy and connected and there's a atmosphere of loving acceptance and so on, and the child thinks, hey, I must be pretty good.

[Theo Von]

I must be, yeah, everything's good, I'm okay.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. But if the parents are stressed, depressed, traumatized, racially challenged, economically challenged, or such terrible things as the children in Gaza are experiencing right now with the daily bombings and all this kind of stuff, what can they think? That there's something wrong with me?

[Theo Von]

Oh, imagine some kid over there in Gaza looking up and there's a bomb and they think, man, I'm so horrible, I deserve to be bombed.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, you know what? There was a study done of guys and children.

[Theo Von]

Man, that's crazy. I hadn't thought about that, like really. Look, imagine that though.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

There was a study done of children in Palestine 21 years ago and 95 cent of those, 95%, this is long before the current horrors. Long before October 7th, long before the aftermath of October 7th, 95% of those kids showed traumatic symptoms. High percentage wet their beds like you and I did. They expressed aggression towards their parents. They had panic attacks, anxiety, fears. Can you imagine what's going to happen to that generation years from now? Years from now? I mean, it just breaks my heart every day when I think about it. And brainy kids. I know a lot of my fellow Jews don't agree with me, but as a Jewish person, I'm not the only one who feels that way. It especially breaks my heart.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. When you put it in that sense, how to kid. Imagine a kid like, you know. Yeah, because what are they going to think? They don't know. They just think, man, something's so wrong with me, I deserve to be killed or something. I don't know.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, it depends if the adults are able to hold them and keep them feeling loved. But 19,000 kids have been orphaned. And when I say orphaned, I don't mean just that their parents have died, their extended families have been wiped out. That's going to be the future of those kids, you know, and anyway, it's just a terrible.

[Theo Von]

No, it's heartbreaking. I mean, it feels like a genocide is going on over there and you don't know what to do, you know, from. It's like, you know, I mean, you can pray, you can speak up about it. And I know that there's like a more political aspects of it and we've had different people Come on to talk about Israel and Palestine on here. And it was very knowledgeable for a lot of our listeners because you hear about it a lot but you don't know the history and everything. But.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, I've been there. I went there two and a half years ago to work with Palestinian women tortured in Israeli jails.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And they had post traumatic stress disorder. I've seen it with my own eyes. And who's the black American writer? 10. Nehisi Coates.

[Theo Von]

T.A. nehisi Coates?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. He just written a new book and he talks about visiting Palestine and he says. Yeah, Ta Nahisi quotes. Yeah, he. In his new book he says, once you go there and see it, you can't unsee it, you know, and your.

[Theo Von]

Media doesn't cover it super fairly. Yeah, I feel like our media doesn't cover it super fairly. That'd be interesting to speak with him then. Thank you for bringing his name up.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Theo Von]

I mean, it's heartbreaking. Anytime something's happening to a child, you know, that should be the one thing that we can all figure out. This shouldn't happen.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, it's also the truth that it's also happening to kids in Israel. There's bombs and rockets and so on. I don't know if this is the time to go into the politics of it. It's not a question of valuing or sort of esteeming one suffering over another. We don't compare traumas. But the degree and the scale of suffering in Gaza is unprecedented, you know?

[Theo Von]

And look, it seems like it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

When my wife walks into her room, I'm 80, I'm typing away, I'm reading a book. She walks into the room and I don't hear. All of a sudden I hear her. I go like this. Now this is the startle response of an infant. If you take a three month old who's sitting there, he's lying there and you go like this. It's called the startle reflex that's built into me because when I was 3 months of age and throughout my first year, Budapest was being bombed by the Allies.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Quite apart from the anti Semitism and the genocide, there was the war going on. So I'd be thrown into a laundry basket and they'd rush me down to the basement. So when I hear a noise, I still go like this.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Now this is 80 years later.

[Theo Von]

Or when you see a load of laundry go by, you know, man. So we can stay with. So say what you're saying is they can stay with you that long it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Can stay with you.

[Theo Von]

It gets locked in you, in your cells. Really, it's.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's actually literally locked into your cells and into your chromosomes. Yeah.

[Theo Von]

I mean, it's heartbreaking for those children on both sides and, and just anywhere, anytime you think like, and even a kid, when they think like, even in America, it's like in America it's like we're bombing each other. Like there's. We can't figure out a way. There's a huge planet here we can't figure out. How can we not figure out a way that we can do live. All God is asking us to do is be alive and do it without war. That seems unreal that we can't figure that out, man.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, that. I mean, the great spiritual teachers have been addressing that insanity for thousands of years.

[Theo Von]

You know, Gabor, how does shame cause us to lose compassion for ourselves?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Let me tell you a story. I mentioned this in the Myth of Normal after my book on addiction came out in the realm of hunger ghosts, I got an email. Not an email, a letter from a guy in Seattle. And he said, I really appreciate your book. And showing how trauma causes is one of the. Not addiction is not the only outcome of trauma, but it's one of the outcomes of trauma, one of the potential outcomes of trauma. And he's really appreciative of that. But he says, I can't blame my mother. It's my own fault that I'm a shit. And I thought, oh my God, you poor guy, you still see yourself that way. But lack of compassion. Because if he actually understood, fully understood that he was just a baby at some point, needing and wanting to be loved and held and seen and valued just for being a human being, and that didn't happen to him, and that caused so much pain in him that he escaped into some drug addiction. He's not a shit, he's just a hurt human being. But that lack of self compassion, I see it all the time in my workshops. When I do therapy work with people, one of my main tasks is to help them to notice. Not to criticize them for it, but to help them to be aware of how they lack compassion for themselves.

[Theo Von]

It's hard to even notice that you're getting in the same circle. It's so hard to even notice that you're in it and you can be living in the center of it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

You know, that's how I was with self pity. I was living it. I just didn't realize it. And the self pity was manifesting itself like oh, you can figure this out. You know, but by trying to constantly help myself figure it out, all I was doing was focusing on my own.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Right.

[Theo Von]

Being not good enough.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Which in a way is really just self.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Self pity. But. But it's also lack of self compassion.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Not giving myself some grace. I remember the first time somebody said, hey, man, give yourself some grace. I'd never even.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Wow.

[Theo Von]

I was like, wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Because people find themselves accusing themselves and talking to themselves in ways that they would never talk to others.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That most people wouldn't. Yeah, some would.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But most wouldn't.

[Theo Von]

Can you notice characteristics or actualities in your life today that you can directly correlate to side effects of childhood trauma?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

My own.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, my capacity to get triggered. And triggered is an interesting word because we keep using it. But what does it mean? Well, it means a reaction that's way out of proportion to the. To the actual stimulus.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Now when you actually look at a. With a metaphor. Comes from. Comes from a gun. Now, how big a part of the gun is the trigger? Small, small little part. What makes the trigger work is that there's ammunition and explosive charge. So as long as I'm full of explosive charge, which is my unresolved trauma, somebody will say, boo, and I'll go, you know, so my capacity to get triggered. My difficulty believing that I was really loved and accepted in my marriage relationship, even though I was.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, my tendency to blame others for my own reactions rather than taking responsibility. In there, we mentioned the addictive behaviors. Certainly the first book I wrote in adhd, it's called Scattered Minds. My scattered mind is certainly an outcome of early stress because, I mean, that dissociation, that tuning out is just an escape mechanism, you know, so the way I was unable to see my kids for the beautiful, sensitive creatures that they were, you know, in my workaholism. Oh, it's shown up in so many ways.

[Theo Von]

You said that not believing that people love us.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, that's.

[Theo Von]

Dude, that's huge, man.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

What is that? Why does that. Why do we. Sometimes you'll be in a marriage, in a relationship, and we'll still believe that person. They don't love me. Or we won't believe their affections. What did you say?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, we won't believe we're loved or accepted. Well, Peter Levine, who's one of the great trauma teachers, he talked about trauma being the tyranny of the past.

[Theo Von]

The attorney of the past.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The tyranny.

[Theo Von]

The tyranny of the past.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So we're in the present moment, but we're actually reacting to the past now. Throughout the first year of my life, given our situation, my mother was really stressed, unhappy, even terrorized. She couldn't give me that calm, attuned, loving attention that I needed. She did her best, for God's sakes. You know, what could be greater love than for a 24 young woman to give her baby to a total stranger in the street? You know, but how do I experience it? I experience is a rejection.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So the person that ought to be loving me is giving me away. I can only conclude from that that I'm not lovable. I see now, once I don't think I'm lovable, I'm not going to believe that anybody actually loves me, no matter what they manifest or what they show me.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and then I blaming them for my own sense of unlovability. This is unprocessed trauma we're talking about. 100%, you know?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. I've almost even thought it sometimes I thought, like, oh, you're dumb for loving me.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Yeah. But that's the other side of it. Yeah. It's like Garchomar said that I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member. Yeah. So anybody would love me. They can't be very bright, can they?

[Theo Von]

Out of their minds. You talk also about not parent blaming, which I think is really important. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, but look, I mean, your story.

[Theo Von]

Right there about your mother gave you away because it was the. Yeah. I mean, imagine the terror, the pain in her of like.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

The only thing, the most loving thing I can do is put my child somewhere else away from me right now for its own safety.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's exactly right.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, all parents, we were born with a caring instinct. You know, like, we're born with certain emotional systems in our brain. Play is one of them. Curiosity seeking, the dopamine circuit is another one. Caring, loving is another one. We're just born with that. It's instinctual. All mammals are born with it.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No mammal infant would survive without it.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, so I don't. I never doubt that parents love their kids or that there's at least an impulse in them to do so. But the love that the parent feels is not that. The love what the parent child receives, what the child receives is the quality of the parent's presence. Are they calm? Are they attuned? Are they emotionally present? Are they preoccupied, stressed, depressed, traumatized, overworked, whatever Any of Those conditions, the child does not experience the love in its whole sense.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So even though you might know that your mother loved you, and I'm sure she did in her own way, and she did her very best, but she was not able to give you those qualities that you would really, in your heart, experience as love.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and so in this society where, as you said earlier, parents have to go to work just to put bread on the table, and where so many people are economically insecure, but there's so much stress, so much division, so much angst, so much aggression, so much suspicion, what's it like to be a parent? It's really, really difficult. And don't forget, we didn't evolve in nuclear families. We evolved in groups where kids around nurturing adults the whole day, including their parents, but not only their parents.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So in today's society, parenting has become an almost an impossible task. Why would I blame any parent? And I'll even say this, and I'm not trying to excuse anything, because there's no excuse. That's not the point. But if you look at parents who abuse their kids, what happened to them as kids?

[Theo Von]

They were abused.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

They were abused. It's multigenerational. It's not that they grow up. It's not that they decide, I'm going to abuse my kids. They just act out what happened to them. So I think blame. No, responsibility is one thing. Blame is another. I think blame is totally unscientific. It's cruel, and it's totally inappropriate. So as much as I point out the impact of early experience, there's absolutely no room for blaming parents. And, Theo, what's really interesting to me is after I wrote my book on addiction, occasionally some strange person would come up to me and said, my child died of an overdose. And I thank you for writing the book. And I always find that a bit startling, because in the book I'm saying that it's childhood experience and trauma that ultimately result in the addiction. And they say, you know what? Because I finally get it. I finally understand what happened, and I get it as multigenerational, that it's nobody's fault. There's nobody to be blamed here. You know, the question is, in each generation, can we take responsibility so we don't pass it on to the next one. But blame, there's no room for it.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And Robert Sapolsky, the scientist who I quoted, he said, there's just no room for blame.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. It's not. It's not. Yeah. You can have. You can have Discussions about responsibility and things like that, and share. Hey, I think you could have been more responsible about this or seeing something that was somebody's responsibility.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And you can even be angry.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Without blaming.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Because why wouldn't you be angry when those things happen to you? So it's not a question of telling people, don't be angry, but having anger and owning it is not the same as saying you did something deliberately that you shouldn't have done and you should have known better. And, you know, you said terrible. You know, it's. So there's anger, healthy anger, necessary anger. And then there's the expectation that people take responsibility.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Each for ourselves. And then there's blame, which is a whole other bag of monkeys.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, we don't. It's a zoo. We don't. We don't need to be involved in.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, we don't need that.

[Theo Von]

What. What makes you laugh? Like, is there, like, shows you like to watch or a thing you like?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, sometimes what makes me laugh is my own ridiculousness.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes me too. I know it's going to be a good day if I find that I'm laughing at myself.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's so many, you know, like, the little human ego is. I mean, on the one hand, we can be compassionate towards it, but on the other hand, it's so ridiculous. So we can laugh at ourselves. My wife and I laugh a lot.

[Theo Von]

Oh, you do?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Yeah. That's one of our. That's one of our saving. It's been 55 years and in a month. And I tell you, we've laughed so much together at ourselves, at each other. That's adorable. You know what makes me laugh? Usually absurdity.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

When things are absurd, they make me laugh. You know, the sort of touch of reality. Yeah, yeah. Those are the things that make me laugh.

[Theo Von]

Is there a, like a film that you like or like? What's a movie that you like? I'm just trying to just know a little bit more about you.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. A movie that made me laugh or just a couple movies. Fish Called Wanda.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Talking about Jamie Lee Curtis that I roared my head off about that one. I don't have such a good memory for that kind of stuff. A funny book will make me laugh, you know?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Do you have a favorite or one or just a fiction book that you like?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I tend to go for the classics, so I keep rereading the Iliad by Homer.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

With the Trojan War. I keep rereading Dostoevsky. I just reread The Brothers Karamazov last year. Because he's such a deep. Such a deep understanding of the human soul. The darkness and the lightness both of the human soul.

[Theo Von]

It's fascinating.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So I tend to go for the classics myself. I read some modern novels, but not that often. By the way, you know what made me laugh? Catch 22. Yeah, I reread that a couple years ago. I split a gut.

[Theo Von]

Who was it? Not John Steinbeck. Who wrote that?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Joseph Heller.

[Theo Von]

Joseph Heller.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Catch 22, I think it was Joseph Feller is his first name.

[Theo Von]

We had to read that, I think in school.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, it. By modern standards, there's some parts of it that are really sexist and misogynist and in some places even racist. So I'm not making any excuse for that. Yeah, it was the zeitgeist at the time.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, sure.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But it's just reprovingly funny about the absurdity of war and the self puffery of important people. Yeah.

[Theo Von]

I'll have to check it out, man. I think I had to read it sometime, but maybe in college we had to read it. Did you ever read John Irving? Any of his books? Like the World According to Garp. Remember that book?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I started reading that decades ago. I never finished it.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, that happened. Some of his books, his latest book is. I don't even know what it is. It's very long.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

I mean, you need to bring a tent with you.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Recently there was a book that's got a lot of attention, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. And she wrote the Poison Wood Bible. That's her most favorite famous book. But Demon Copperhead is kind of a modern take on. On David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. And it takes place in Appalachia.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And I just saw an interview over there yesterday how she goes after J.D. vance.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Because she's an Appalachian.

[Theo Von]

Right. So they're both from that area.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

They're both from that area.

[Theo Von]

Different mindsets.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And she's saying, buddy, you don't represent us, you know? And Demon Copperhead takes on the hillbilly image of Appalachians and plays with it beautifully.

[Theo Von]

Wow. I'd love to check that out. She seems like an interesting woman.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

She's a very interesting woman. She's very, very thoughtful, very forthright.

[Theo Von]

That'd be cool. Yeah. Maybe I can. Maybe after I read the book, I could see if she would want to come and visit sometimes. Like, I always like feel like I have to explain my intentions. There's a part of me that always feels like I'm manipulating somebody. Do you know what I'm talking about.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's not a feeling.

[Theo Von]

So what is it? It's a thought.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's a belief.

[Theo Von]

It's a belief.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. No, and there's a reason why you have it.

[Theo Von]

Like, even if I'm just doing something nice, there's a part of me that's like, oh, you're.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. You think you're a fake.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. It's called the imposter syndrome.

[Theo Von]

Okay.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And it has to do with the fact that you couldn't be real as a kid. In some ways, you had to pretend. And it's really hard to let go of that. Of that sense that I'm still doing it.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's what you grew up with. So you could be kind to that part of yourself.

[Theo Von]

Okay.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The part that you could actually. Because it's not a feeling, you know, Theo, It's a belief. And the beliefs can be. You don't argue with feelings, but beliefs you can challenge. Is it really true that you're manipulating. Like, when you're talking to me now? Are we having a genuine conversation?

[Theo Von]

I believe that we are.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Or is it true that you're actually manipulating me in any way at all?

[Theo Von]

No, I don't think I am.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And furthermore, give me some credit. Maybe you can't manipulate me even if you wanted to, so that's very fair, dude. So that fear of yours is both lack of compassion towards yourself and a lack of, in a sense, trust in the other person's capacity to look after themselves.

[Theo Von]

That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. It's just funny. I was just talking with my brother yesterday because we had similar childhoods, and we're thinking of what are some things that I could think about to talk with him about. And we were talking about that. That sometimes we always feel like there's something like we're manipulating ourselves or that our ability to manipulate would be so powerful that we wouldn't even know.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

What we're doing. Which is pretty crazy, too.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's a lack of self trust.

[Theo Von]

Lack of self trust.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No. You know, what have I manipulated? Yes, I have.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, sure.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, but it's not a question. That one never does it. But I know when I'm manipulating.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And usually it's because I want something that I don't know how to stay directly where I'm afraid that I might not get otherwise, you know? And then I'm afraid to show up with my vulnerable request, which would make sense.

[Theo Von]

As a child, there was something you wanted that you didn't think you were going to get otherwise.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's right.

[Theo Von]

You didn't show.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Makes sense.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Children. Children manipulate out of a sense of weakness, and that's pretty much all they can do if otherwise they don't get their needs met.

[Theo Von]

A lot of your book that I've read so far, it's about. It's getting to the part where it's like that Western medicine doesn't always take into context as much that the body and the mind like us as an entire thing, as our society as. You know, it's almost like if, say, if the whole world and time and culture and everything were a car, instead of the doctor looking at the car, they just look at the human, which would just be one part of the car. And so they're always just working on this one part instead of looking at the whole car, which could also be a cause of why the part isn't doing well.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's the whole point. And see, we have to make a distinction here. There's Western science, then there's medical practice.

[Theo Von]

Understood.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The two are not the same necessarily.

[Theo Von]

Okay.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So I was trained as a medical doctor. Nobody ever taught me about the mind, body unity. But physiologically, you can't separate the mind from the body. So that our emotional circuits and the immune system and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are actually one system. They're not separate systems. So when things happen emotionally, naturally, they have a physiological effect.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, so I could give you 10,000 examples. Children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma.

[Theo Von]

Children of what?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma.

[Theo Von]

Okay.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So the airways narrow and they get inflamed. Black. There's a study that showed that black American women, the more episodes of racism they experience, the higher the risk of asthma.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's been shown that women with severe PTSD have double the risk of ovarian cancer. This is a study out of Harvard University. Adults who experience the loss of an adult child have a higher risk of malignancy of the bone marrow and the blood.

[Theo Von]

Grief.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Grief. A Danish study. Parents who lost a child have double the risk of multiple sclerosis. There are hundreds of studies showing the physiological impact of stress and trauma and.

[Theo Von]

Loss on the physiology, so manifesting itself in our bodies as a disease or.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Contributing to the onset of the disease.

[Theo Von]

Got it. And yeah, because cancer, it's like, you know, you say in the book, like, people get cancer. A lot of times you hear like, the guy got cancer, he died three weeks later.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Right.

[Theo Von]

You hear that all the time. But the cancer had been there forever.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And it just enough had happened, I guess, that it turned over into being.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, we know that stress, for example, can turn off genes that protect you against cancer and turn on genes that can cause cancer.

[Theo Von]

Really?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not even controversial. And we know that people that repress their healthy anger, they're actually suppressing their immune system. And this stuff has been studied over and over again and great clinicians have been recognizing this forever. And 2400 years ago, Socrates, the Greek philosopher, said that the problem with the doctors of today is that they separate the mind from the body.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

2400 years ago. Now I can name you any number of great medical pioneers. I mentioned some of them in the book who 150 years ago, 100 years ago, 80 years ago, 40 years ago, pointed out that mind and body can't be separated, that in fact we are biopsychosocial creatures, which means that our biology is inseparable from our psyche, our emotional apparatus and from our social relationships.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So all of it, it's all one. Scientifically, it's all one. The problem is medical practice doesn't recognize that oneness. So most of the time you go to a physician with rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis, for both of which there's plenty of evidence about the role of trauma and stress. But the doctor's never going to ask you about any of that stuff. They're just going to deal with the physical aspects of it, which they should deal with. But they also need to look at the whole, you know, what happened in this person's life and what's stressing them now and how can we help with that part of it, you know, so medical practice, as a doctor, I don't know to be told how miraculously effective the achievements of modern medicine, for sure. But at the same time there's a huge piece that we're missing and that piece is not just intuitive or spiritual. Woohoo. It's science. But they don't teach that mind body unity science in the medical schools.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. In fact the piece is a whole. That's what they're missing.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

They're missing, they're missing the wholeness. Now if you look at indigenous medicine.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

There's the medicine wheel, which consists of four quadrants. There's the physical, our physiology, there's the mental, which is our emotions and our thoughts. There's the social, which is our relationships with other people and other creatures. And then there's the Spiritual, which is our connection with something greater than just a little ego, however you define that. And health, they say, depends on a balance between those four quadrants. Scientifically, that's totally true, but unfortunately that science is largely ignored in medical training.

[Theo Von]

I'm sure. Yeah. Well, especially now, a lot of our medicine has kind of been compromised, or I think our industry has, you know. Oh, yeah, maybe. I don't know and I don't know your industry, and I'm not trying to offend it, but it certainly seems like just, you know, it's been compromised. Most industries have been. A lot of compromise have been compromised. You know, the fact to have better, you know, balance sheets then.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But look, if you come to me with depression, by the way, that's another diagnosis that I've had. So I've, I've actually taken medication for depression. So I'm not here to. You're not just guessing to dismiss them. Yeah, but if you look at the word depression, what does it actually mean? To depress something, hold it back, to push it down? Yeah. Now what gets pushed down in depression?

[Theo Von]

Your feelings.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Our feelings. Why would a person push down their feelings? One of the needs of the child. One of the essential needs of the child, as I point out in this book, I don't make this stuff up, I just report it is to be able to experience all their emotions. Anger, grief, fear, panic, love, playfulness, curiosity, lust for life and just hunger for life. The child doesn't need to express all those emotions when they arise and have that understood, accepted and validated by the adults. No. If I'm in an environment where the parents can't do that. You've had guests on this program, I won't mention them by name. Who teach that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. No, right? No. A two year old kid gets frustrated, they get angry. If you give that kid the message that if you're angry, you can't be with me, the child is an impossible dilemma. Am I going to separate myself from the person on whom my life depends or will I push down my anger? Well, give that message to the kid often enough. What are they going to do? Depress their feelings? 30 years later they diagnosed with this disease called depression. You know, now if you come to me with depression, I might decide that temporarily it might be a good idea for you to be an antidepressant. And I've taken them. They helped me for a while, you know, but it's not enough. Let's also look at what made you push down your feelings? What happened to you? Now, prescribing the antidepressant takes me three minutes.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Talking with you about what actually happened to you, that made you push down your feelings, that takes a long time.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And doctors are not even trained to raise that question. So even if, as a physician, I don't have the expertise to deal with that question, at least I could refer you to somebody who does.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But no, most of the time it's just the industrial model. You come in, I got five minutes with you, here's the prescription. Goodbye. Well, that doesn't deal with the underlying problem. It deals with the symptom, which may sometimes be helpful, sometimes it isn't. But whether it's helpful or not, it does not deal with the underlying dynamic.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Oh yeah. It's just. And it's just where our society is too. We've gone so far down this road and it's just like, how do we. Yeah. Back in the day, it's like it seemed like if you were like, maybe this is crazy, but if you were like just a small group around a campfire, you could, you could see if somebody was hurting you. There was. Everything was right there. You couldn't hide anything.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Not only that, you know what you would do? You do ceremonies, healing rituals.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You would drum, you would dance, you would chant, you would shake a stick. Ibi communal. A friend of mine who I quote in the book, he's a part Lakota physician and psychiatrist. His name is Luis Mel Madrona. And he said in the Lakota tradition, when somebody gets sick, the community says thank you. Your illness represents some imbalance in our community.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You're like the canary in the mine. So your healing is our healing. So let's do this together. Now. That makes so much sense.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Both scientifically and emotionally. We don't do that. We sort of isolate the individual and then we separate the mind from the body. So we say it's just a brain problem. No, it isn't. It's a life problem. And that life is lived in an environment, in a multi generational family, in a certain culture. Let's look at the whole thing, that's all.

[Theo Von]

Do you think we can start to head more in that direction or how do you think this changes? Because we are pretty far down the well here, I think. Because sometimes you even said roar. Like sometimes I feel like our whole planet just wants to fucking roar, you know, it's like it just like I feel like everybody just wants to go in the yard and Just scream at the. At that sky. It's like, I don't know, it feels like there's just something trapped in us that is. Does that make any sense, man?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, yeah. And it's had some cultural expression as well. What was that movie where somebody yells, I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore. And he starts yelling, oh, falling down.

[Theo Von]

Michael Douglas.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Is that. It was. I don't know which movie it was, but it was. Somebody just starts yelling, I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore. And everybody starts yelling, I'm fed up, I can't take it I anymore. You know, I think there's a deep sense of frustration in this culture.

[Theo Von]

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to be able to take this anymore.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, it's network.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah, network. That's a great movie. If you've never seen it, it's a great movie.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I'm a mad as well. No, that was decades ago. I think the level of frustration in our society has increased. Why are people frustrated? Because their needs aren't being met.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And that scream, look, I travel all over the world. I just came back from a three week, six country tour of Europe.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I talked to 12,000 people. That sense of frustration, that sense of longing that we talked about, it's so universal these days. It is, yeah.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, that is it. Because that's what. Yeah, that's what it feels like. This or other people feeling this. That's what I wonder a lot. Or other people feeling this same way.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, some people are not because they escape. And this society is absolutely brilliant at creating escapes through mass media.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Mass sports consumption and so on. But I'll say something here, and this is particularly true of comedians. I have found some people are just born more sensitive.

[Theo Von]

That's a great point too. And I have to take that into account. We all do.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And more sensitive means. Sensitive is from the Latin word sincere, to feel. Now, some people are genetically born more sensitive. They feel more. That means when things go wrong, they feel it more than the others. So the same thing can happen externally to different people. But if one of them is more sensitive, they're going to feel it all the more. So it's especially this highly sensitive people who are feeling that scream that you talk about.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, that's a great point. That it. Yeah, yeah, that's what it's just like. I just feel like we've just gone so far off the path of.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But if I can say something, your sense that we've gone off the path. What in you knows that?

[Theo Von]

Like, what part of me you mean?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

What in you? Who in you knows that we've gone off the path? It's the part that hasn't gone off the path. It's the part that actually sees. So that I don't want to create too much doom and gloom here.

[Theo Von]

No.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

There is this self here. There's this trueness here. That's never been damaged, never been destroyed. There's nobody's damaged goods that way. It's always in here. It's a question of can we connect with it?

[Theo Von]

Right. You know, and that. Yeah. How do we get back to connecting with that sort of thing? Because our society, our culture is not going to do it for us. It doesn't feel like we might have to start with it as individuals. Does that make sense?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

We do begin as individuals. But you probably realized, I mean, just for example, in your AA group, there's a community there.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Who have a lot of shared experiences and who are very vulnerably open in sharing their experiences. And that's a source of support when you share about yourself. That's a source of support to others when they share about themselves. That's support for you. So that ultimately, no, we don't have to do it by ourselves. It begins as an individual process. But pretty soon you find that we're not alone.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Do you think we can get out of this toxic culture? Do you feel like there's a way out of where we are? Or do you feel like that humanity is just.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I believe in human beings.

[Theo Von]

That's a great statement. I do, too.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I believe that there's an essential goodness there, a desire to connect, a desire to belong, desire to. To celebrate life. You know, I think that's. We're endowed with those capacities. And as difficult as things may look, and especially these days with these terrible wars going on and the suffering that we've talked about, I still believe that. There's so many examples. Everywhere I go, I meet such good people. People are trying to make a difference. People are trying to do their little bit or their big bit to reduce the suffering in the world, to speak the truth, to offer some love, compassion to the world. I really do believe in humans. No, we have the potential to be monsters. We have the potential to be angels. But that good side never totally disappears. Some people, it's covered over so much that that might never get in touch with it. Most people, I think, are quite capable of getting there once they decide that they want to.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. I Think. What scares me, I think, is that in order to be a human being, we have to have the present moment. Right. We have to be able to still have, like, the ability to reflect and recognize and think. And our society or our culture has created a lot where we're so many distractions. So that if we never even take the time, if they can distract. If we can be distracted enough from being able to really think or feel. Yeah, feel, really. Probably starting with feeling, then. Then we'll be trapped forever, in a way. Well, does that make sense at all?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's interesting how you say all these really insightful things, then you keep asking me if it makes sense or not.

[Theo Von]

I'm sorry.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Don't apologize.

[Theo Von]

I can't think and talk sometimes at the same time. I can't feel and speak at this. It's just.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, but I'm just telling you that. I'm not criticizing. I'm just noticing something.

[Theo Von]

I don't feel like you are appreciated.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. So here's the thing. We're born as feeling creatures.

[Theo Von]

Right?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

We feel before we think.

[Theo Von]

Yes.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

The feeling apparatus is present in us before we were even born. The thinking apparatus doesn't start developing till much later on.

[Theo Von]

That's true.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So that if there's a scaffolding of healthy feelings, then our thinking will be aligned with reality. But it's the feelings that we're feelings. We're feeling creatures before we're thinking creatures.

[Theo Von]

Got it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So what you said makes absolute sense, even from the evolutionary and physiological point of view. Like, animals feel, but they don't necessarily think. In fact, they don't think.

[Theo Von]

Some of them don't.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But without thinking, without feeling, they wouldn't survive.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and we think we can get by our own thinking. We got it backwards.

[Theo Von]

Yes. That's what it feels like these days.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

It feels like everybody's just thinking. It's like, even with, like, autonomous inventions and technology, I'm like, at a certain point, I don't want any more technology if it's not helping us.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I know.

[Theo Von]

Like, stop. Like, you're killing what it means to be me or not me as a huge. But just us. It feels like we don't need to get faster. It's just like you're going to take jobs with. If a guy doesn't have a job, he doesn't have a purpose. Having. Having a job isn't only your purpose, but it. It's what gives people some sense of purpose.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And I mean a sense of meaning.

[Theo Von]

And a sense of meaning. Right. And once you don't feel like you have any of that? Then what are you. It's like almost just. I don't understand why our society wants that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, first of all, I totally get where you're coming from. Because when we talk about AI my, my mind glazes over. I don't care.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I don't want one more piece of technology. I'm much more interested in what happens with human beings.

[Theo Von]

100. That's man. Thank you, dude. That's how I feel.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

I just care how people feel, you know, And I just like. I don't know.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And when you talk about meaning, if you look at the diminishing lifespan of especially white American men, it's that loss of meaning when they hollowed out the industrial heartland of America and they outsourced all the, you know, cheap labor to other countries. Well, you can see that from the profit motive, it makes sense. But from the point of view of human lives, you just deprive people of the sense of meaning, you know, and that sense of meaning, it's. A psychologist friend of mine calls dislocation is a major source of distress and a major source of self harm and addiction.

[Theo Von]

Well, I even think like it used to be, and I say this many times, but like somebody worked in your area and they worked at a factory and they made a, like a table and they brought it and you even had one of the tables at your house and you were proud of your dad because he worked there and, and he made it and then. But now you have somebody in another country mailing something over here. They don't care about it that they're making it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Their kids don't know even what they do probably, you know, and it just, it's this like, where is the victim? I don't understand what level of this we're going to get to that is healthy.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, I think now what we're talking about here is the good old profit motive because profits don't care about human values, you know, and most companies, that's what they're interested in is what will maximize profits. And if they have to throw a thousand people out of a job in some town, they'll do it.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and I don't understand that though. Well, work, I think is very important to people. I mean. Yeah, we're creatures who work.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I just read a really interesting book, by the way. It's called the continuum concept, published 40 years ago or so. This woman goes to the Venezuelan jungle, six weeks away from civilization, and she watches all these Stone Age people bring up their kids. That's the book right there. The Kundunyan concept. How they bring up their kids while they hold them everywhere. Like we said, they don't punish them, they don't yell at them. These kids will grow up really happy and comfortable with themselves. But the point I'm making is this tribe, they don't have a word for work. They have a word for cutting wood. They have a word for planting. They have a word for fishing. They have a word for washing, but there's no word for work. In other words, they just do what they do, but there's no alienation from it.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Whatever they're into, they're just into it. That's what they're doing. But they're only kidding. Here we talk about work, life, balance, but look at that phrase. What does that imply? That here's life and here's work, and the two are not the same.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. It's almost like we enslaved ourselves, what we have. And then also our society, as you're saying, creates so much stress and uncomfort. Because, like, say if you took something that's supposed to be somewhere and you put it somewhere else, it's going to always feel stressed because it's not like in its home. Right. It's not in its natural spot.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Funny you should say that, because I often say you can study a zebra and you could conclude that the zebra is an animal that mostly lies around all day, gets up a few times to eat or to defecate or something, and then lies down again, walks around a little bit. And it would be true if you observed the zebra in a zoo, in a cage. But if you observed the zebra out there on a savanna or wherever he. She lives, you'd see a totally different creature.

[Theo Von]

Oh, they're turned out there.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And human beings, in a sense, we put ourselves into a zoo. We're so far away from our natural evolutionary environment. It's not a question again of going back to Stone Age, but it's a question of recognizing what we've lost. In a certain sense, we've put ourselves into a zoo and we're studying ourselves totally out of our elements. And then we're wondering how come things are going so badly.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, it's crazy. It's almost, and I hate to even laugh at it, but you're saying it's absurd.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It's absurd.

[Theo Von]

We're literally living in a theater of the absurd.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

In your book, you also talk about, like, the history of humanity, that what we call civilization is less than 5% of our existence as a species. Right. That for the entire span of the human genus, that it represents less than 1%.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Of that time.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Like our civilization. Right. We're such a small piece of how long humans have been alive.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And we have learned that such groups a long time ago, held values emphasizing hospitality, sharing, generosity and reciprocal exchange for the purpose not of personal enrichment, but of connection. These values were intelligent, time tested guidelines for mutual survival. Yes. There was violence and bad behavior and all the rest. We have never been perfect. But we knew something about setting the collective context for our humanists to flourish fruitfully.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

That it was a group effort.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It was a group thing. And people never saw themselves as separate from the environment or from animals.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Or from other human beings. And in British Columbia, excuse me, where I live, the indigenous people used to have a ceremony called a potlatch. And the potlatch is they would invite all these people, neighbors and other tribes and so on, and they'd give things to each other. So it wasn't about getting, it was about giving. When the British colonialists arrived, you know what they did? They outlawed the potlatch.

[Theo Von]

Damn.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Because they wanted to kill that spirit of communality.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That the indigenous people thrived on. So they knew how to do it. So they forbade a lot of the practices that gave the indigenous people meaning, including the giving. And until very recently, decades ago, it was outlawed. So people had to do stuff in secret. You know, they outlawed the chanting. They had to chant in secret because they knew the healing power of the chants. And the chants really connected indigenous people to their traditions. Now, the colonialists did this everywhere. They did this in the States. They did it in Australia and New Zealand. They did it in Canada, of course, parts of Africa. And so that a real effort was made to divorce people from their essential communal drives.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. That's what it feels like. That's what it feels like inside. Like we're not supposed to be doing this.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

You know, one woman that you mentioned, Darcia Narvaez.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Darshan Arvaz.

[Theo Von]

Darshan Arvez.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Said that we have become species atypical. A sobering idea when you think about it. No other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Or to destroy its own environment.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. I still wonder if Mother Nature is mad about, like, if some of the diseases we have now are because of, like, what happened to the indigenous Cultures, you know, if some of that just like, is like, you know, because mother Nature remembers, you know, and so it's like, are we still just suffering the sins of, like, what's happened a long time ago?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

We are, yeah. And the problem is we haven't learned from it yet. Like, actually, I work a lot with indigenous people in Canada. They often invite me to talk about addiction and stress and trauma and so on.

[Theo Von]

Oh, some of them. We did a show in Vancouver. Some of them came out to the show.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Did they?

[Theo Von]

And they gave me some gifts.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, fantastic.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, it's really, really beautiful.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Beautiful, isn't it?

[Theo Von]

Yeah, it was awesome, man. Yeah, it was great. It was really nice of them.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But. But so, so I do a lot of that work, but I get so much from it because there's such deep wisdom. Like, even with all their trauma and all the dysfunction, all the addiction and mental illness amongst them, which is strictly a result of colonial trauma, but there's still such gentle wisdom. There's still such connection. I remember doing a ceremony with them, some indigenous friends two years ago. Art and nature. They talk to every plant. They're so connected, you know, such deep wisdom. And I actually believe that when this society starts getting its head screwed on right, we'll be very humbly willing to learn from the indigenous people.

[Theo Von]

Yes.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, like, yes, civilization has brought many amazing things. Not to forget that. But what if we could meld our technological know how and scientific brilliance with indigenous wisdom?

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

What a world we could actually create.

[Theo Von]

And maybe that is where we're headed. Right. I think that has to be the hope. Well, that's, you know, that's.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I believe that's certainly a possibility.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. I think that has to be the hope that we take away. Yeah. Because if I were ever a leader, I think we would get back to some of the things that were important, you know? You know, one of my favorite times when I was a kid, the power would go out sometimes.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

And so we'd all have to, like, mom would put a couple candles out and so we'd all have to be right there together. Yeah. And it was just like. I don't know, all that mattered was just like. Like you could joke and. But it was like, I don't know, like we just all needed each other. You needed to know where everybody were. Is everybody here? I don't know. There was something special about that.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, you can see it even now when there's disasters. People really come together.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

They tend to come together to support each other.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

They'll go out of their way to give and to support.

[Theo Von]

Oh, for sure. You're seeing it with the flooding and stuff in the Southeast right now, many places all over the world. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's so much to learn from our natives from. From the indigenous people of the land, you know, just as we learn from animals and all parts of nature.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, Darshan was the scientist today psychologist that you mentioned, and she's written a book called the Evolved Nest. And she's talking about our commonality with other animals and how they rear their young and what we could learn from them.

[Theo Von]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's an amazing little book. I wrote the foreword for it. Darsha has done some amazing work on the actual needs of human beings. Really?

[Theo Von]

She's a pretty fascinating woman, which is very interesting.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Very interesting. If you ever want to talk to her, I'm happy to connect you.

[Theo Von]

That would be really cool. You Canadians are dang interesting, man.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, Darsha is American.

[Theo Von]

Oh, she is?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Theo Von]

She'll take it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, no. She's a retired professor at University of Notre Dame.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And she's still very active. And this book is called the Evolved Nest. It's just a slim little volume.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But you should learn about how penguins bring up their kids. Or are wolves. When a mother dies, then wolves who haven't even been pregnant start lactating to feed the young ones.

[Theo Von]

Wow.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and how when the baby elephant is born, you know what happens?

[Theo Von]

All the other mother elephants put their trunks on it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. All the other mothers, you know, they stand around, they touch the baby. They know the need for touch. I mean, there's incredible wisdom in animals as well. And Darsha and her writing partner, Gay Bradshaw, they really show us the lessons we could actually derive just from watching our animals bring up their young.

[Theo Von]

We still have a lot to learn. Is that the best message to take away from your book, do you think?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

We still have a lot to learn, and we need to be humble. We need to realize that for all our achievements and our intellectual brilliance, we've come disconnected from our hearts, from our gut feelings. And that we need to really be curious about our hearts and our guts are telling us, not just our intellects.

[Theo Von]

Amen. Yeah. We need an emotional revolution.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's a good way to put it.

[Theo Von]

Before you go. And thank you so much for your time.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh, my pleasure.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. There's a part. Rafi. There's a guy in the book. Rafi or Rafi? Rafi.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, Rafi's a children's singer.

[Theo Von]

A children say, oh, yeah, that guy.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's him.

[Theo Von]

I'd like to be him.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Let's see.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Is that him?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, no, that's Ringo Starr. Oh, you're singing Octopus's Garden.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Oh, Jesus.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But. But Rafi used to sing Baby Beluga.

[Theo Von]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, and Apples.

[Theo Von]

Know. Is that song?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah, yeah. And Banana Phone.

[Theo Von]

And he says, we discover who we are from the inside. You wrote that on your book.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And Raffi actually played at. In the White House at the Clinton inauguration.

[Theo Von]

Oh, sweet.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And he's like the children's troubadour of the world.

[Theo Von]

Yes. When I was a child, we listened to. Yes, they had all of it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Mr. Rafi is a friend of mine.

[Theo Von]

Oh, excellent.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And at some point, some years ago, he woke us up. Wakes up in the middle of the night, and the word child honoring comes into his head. And he says, what would the world look like if we honored children and the needs of children? So he started this child honoring Institute. Now, the thing about his singing for children is he's not condescending. He really plays with kids and really gets them. And his heart is really so childlike. So he says, whatever. The quote was that.

[Theo Von]

We discover who we are from the inside.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

We discover who we are from the inside. And he's actually talking about how human beings develop, which is through our feelings first. And those feelings begin in the uterus. So already, when a mother is stressed, the child feels that in the uterus, and that stresses the child. And that interferes with the child's brain development. So that actually we develop our sense from our feelings first. And as I said earlier, then the intellect comes in.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But if the emotional circuits are out of balance because of early stress, then it's hard for us to even think straight.

[Theo Von]

Right. And our society we have is so many mothers have to work. It's like we've just. Yeah, we're a little misconstrued.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. And what nature would prefer scientifically and physiologically, is for the baby with the mother for at least nine months, but actually for years now. Or if not the mother, but at least with the mother for at least nine months. But ideally well beyond that, but with other nurturing adults.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

So it's not just caregivers who give you food and. Right.

[Theo Von]

It's the mother, the grandmother, the aunt, the neighbor, the sense of community, your whole genes being right there. Like, yeah, there's. How did we get off on such a different Tangent, then if we were supposed to be in these tribes, these groups, it's just evolution and there's nothing we can do about it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, that's, you know, that's civilization.

[Theo Von]

Right. Civilization.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Which is. Obviously brought all kinds of benefits, but also look at.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

All that we've lost. So again, it's. For me, can we value our achievements and our knowledge and try to remember what we've lost and trying to reconnect with those parts of ourselves that we've kind of got divorced from?

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Yeah. When you. Yeah. And your children. Just look into them. Pour into them what you want out of them, you know?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Pour into them as much as you can. And yes. Some. Some kids don't know how to feel. Sometimes you have to also talk them about their feelings.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

No, you don't. They know exactly how to feel. They don't have the words for. So you.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

They know how to feel. It's our job to give them words for their feelings.

[Theo Von]

Right. It's. Right. It's our job to give them words for their feelings. Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

So, yeah. If your child. If you're not doing that, it's. It's not a judgment. And I don't have any children, but that's what I could have used when I was young. It was like, how do you feel? Let me help you with this.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Not even how you feel. You're really angry with Daddy right now because you wanted a cookie before dinner and Daddy said, no cookie. So now you're really angry, aren't you? Yeah. You know, so it's not even. We don't have to tell them how to feel. They're feeling creatures. We have to accept their feelings.

[Theo Von]

Okay.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That doesn't mean we give them the cookie.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

But it means that we do understand.

[Theo Von]

Like, hey, hey, I understand you want that cook.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Right. Now you're really mad at Daddy. Okay, I get it.

[Theo Von]

I get it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. You know, that's all.

[Theo Von]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That doesn't mean you're allowed to hate your brother, but I get that you're angry. So we're not talking about permissive parenting. We're talking about authoritative parenting. Not authoritarian, authoritative, where the child is understood and held and guided, and we give them words for their feelings, but we don't ask them to suppress themselves. We may not accept certain behaviors or put limits, but we know how to do that. If the child trusts you and is looking to you like natives, indigenous people, like we said earlier, never had to never hit their kids because the kids trusted the adults for guidance.

[Theo Von]

Right.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

You know, so. Which all comes from connection 100%.

[Theo Von]

And now we're learning so many things. We learn them like, you know, through a YouTube video or through. We. We learn. So we. I mean, now most people learn about sex through pornography. It's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need each other to. Yeah, we need each other. And we're creating more and more that we don't.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

That's right. And we're creating more and more that if you have needs, there's something wrong with you.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

If you have emotional needs, you're a weakling, you know.

[Theo Von]

Oh. One day our feelings will be in a museum. You'll go visit them there. Like, hey, remember this? They used to have that. Doctor, mate, thank you just for putting all this together. It's really fascinating. You. I mean, you have so many other, like, therapists and scientists and philosophers and doctors and everything you quote that you've quoted in here to really put together a beautiful piece of work here.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Thank you.

[Theo Von]

It's really fascinating. And it's not all, like, Debbie Downer stuff either. And. And I don't mean to be. And I don't think we were that much in this conversation. It's just looking at things and saying, hey, well, let's take a look at where we are possibly. How did we get here?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, that's my intention, and my intention is to promote healing, actually. It's not just to spread doom and gloom. And actually the healing part of the book is the longest part of the book.

[Theo Von]

I'm not there yet.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, I hope you get there someday.

[Theo Von]

I think I will.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

I've been reading that. A good clip. I'm enjoying it.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Well, I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. It was. If I can boast, can I post?

[Theo Von]

Sure. I would love for you.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

It was 19 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list for a year and a half. It was a Canadian bestseller. It's been published in 41 languages now internationally, and it's been a bestseller in a whole lot of countries. So I think there's value in this book.

[Theo Von]

Well, I think also that it's good to know that enough people are starting to recognize in some of the same thought, you know.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Yeah.

[Theo Von]

Because that in itself, those numbers itself, and that prolificness gives is a source of hope, I think.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

I think what's happening actually is that a society in some ways goes more into crisis also. More and more people are waking up.

[Theo Von]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

And they're starting to ask questions, and I see that as a good thing.

[Theo Von]

Yeah, I do, too. Thank you for letting me ask you questions today. Thank you for. Yeah. Just for your time. So many of my friends love you and look up to you. I. I had my own therapist was like, he's asking. I'm like, well, you're my therapist. But he was excited that I was getting this down with you. So. Yeah. Thank you so much for your commitment to curiosity, and thanks for your time. Now I'm just floating on the breeze? And I feel I'm falling? Like these leaves? I must be cornerstone?

[Dr. Gabor Maté]

Oh?

[Theo Von]

But when I reach background? I'll share this piece of my life found? I can feel it in my bones? But it's going to take a little.