The F-Word Miniseries: Gabor Maté on Feelings

0:13Hello and welcome to this How to Fail mini-series. Now, as you'll know if you're a regular listener, this podcast is dedicated to a greater understanding of what failure really is, what we learn from it, how we grow from it, and whether, if we choose not to be defined by our mistakes, it actually helps us become the truest versions of ourselves. Inspired by failure, I'm now bringing you the F Word miniseries. Failure is still the overarching theme, and two of these episodes have the conventional how-to-fail interview structure. But within that, we explore three different F-words, feelings, friendships, and fuel.

0:57By fuel, I mean what motivates us, by the way. I'm not talking about oil or gas or, well, cheese. We'll be talking about ambition, motivation, and what drove the army sergeant's son who left school at 15 to found one of the biggest banks in the world and become a billionaire? Has money made him happy? And is his ambition a blessing or a curse? We'll also be talking to one of the foremost experts in addiction and trauma about the importance of understanding our feelings and what can happen when we ignore them. And we'll be chatting to a how-to-fail favourite about the power of friendship. Three days, three episodes, three F-Words.

1:41It'll be effing great. Welcome to the How to Fail F-Word miniseries. Today, we start with Gabor Mate on feelings. My guest today is Dr. Gabor Mate, a renowned speaker, physician, and best-selling author, a practitioner who has revolutionized our understanding of health and whose work on stress, addiction, and childhood development has reshaped our understanding of what it is to be human. As a doctor, he spent 20 years in family practice and palliative care, working for over a decade in downtown Vancouver with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. What he learned went into his four best-selling books, including the worldwide hit When the Body Says No, The Hidden Cost of Stress, which argued controversially at the time that stress had a major role in the onset of most chronic diseases.

2:39Born in Budapest in 1944, Dr. Mate's early childhoods was spent in the terrifying shadow of Nazi occupation, an experience that would impact the rest of his life in ways that took him many years to understand. He touches on this in his new book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, co-authored with his son Daniel. It outlines how true health is possible, but only if we are willing to embrace authenticity above social expectations. It has already been described as a masterpiece by critics, and by Gabor's son as his father's magnumist opus yet. Dr. Gabor Mate, welcome to How to Fail.

3:25Pleasure to be here, thank you. It's so lovely to have you. We were chatting before we started recording about how often you are quoted on this podcast, because so much of what you write about tallies exactly with the premise of this show, which is essentially the authenticity is the key to everything. But what's brilliant about your book, The Myth of Normal, is that it shows how hard it can sometimes be to find our authentic selves. Could you explain to us a bit more about that? Well, yes, and also the resonance with your program is that it's through our difficulties that we actually learn. It's when we experience setbacks that we find out what is not authentic or authentic about us.

4:05But that original tension comes from an unfortunate circumstance in modern life, is that a lot of children have the experience that their true selves are not accepted by their parents, not seen, not heard, not appreciated. As a matter of fact, when trauma happens, the true self is actually squelched and we're disconnected from it. A lot of people find that in order to be acceptable to their families of origin, they need to suppress some aspects of their essential emotional life to present a face that's acceptable to the world. This society then feeds on that. It loves image, it loves outward success, it loves compliance, it loves people working hard to be accepted by society.

4:48So that both from the point of view of personal original development in childhood and then social expectation, we increasingly lose contact with our true selves. so as a matter of fact since suppressing ourselves was a necessity in childhood in order to be accepted we actually unconsciously identify inauthenticity with survival yes now once you identify inauthenticity with survival you're not going to give up very easily and sometimes it takes failure or disease or some suffering to knock us on the head and say well this inauthenticity is costing us. But those are hard lessons and scary ones for a lot of people.

5:29The particular culture and society that you're investigating is a modern one. Do you think, I mean, I understand that the rise of social media and the importance of image and aesthetic has definitely had a deleterious impact. But do you think it was ever thus? Do you think in cave men and women times, there were still people who struggled with authenticity i doubt it i mean first of all the whole idea of cavemen i mean mostly we weren't cavemen at all we were people living in the wild hunter-gatherers that's how we evolved the caveman thing i suppose we did live in caves because there's some evidence for that but that wasn't ever the essence of our existence we lived in nature in small bound hunter-gatherer groups very much connected to our gut feelings which is the essence of authenticity because if you think Think about it for a moment.

6:15Any creature living in the wild, animal or human, or human and other animal, I should put it that way. How long does it survive if it's not connected to their gut feelings? So we had no choice but to be connected to our authenticity. But I gave a talk this morning, there were multiple hundreds of people there, and I asked them, as I often do, raise your hand if you've had the following experience. That you have a strong gut feeling about something, powerful gut feeling, you ignore it and you're sorry afterwards. Whenever I put that question to people, virtually everybody puts their hands up. Now that means something happened to them that made them give up their authentic connection to themselves.

6:52And you've never met a one-day-old baby, have you, that is not authentic, that doesn't connect with their feelings and doesn't express them immediately. So something happens. And that's something that happens, I think, is very much a phenomenon of civilization and increasingly so in modern civilization. so that, no, I don't think in our original state we could have evolved as a species if we were that disconnected from ourselves. You mentioned one day or babies there. Let's go back to you as a baby because you start the book with this very deep anecdote that appears superficial to begin with, which is what your work is very good at, about arriving back home on a plane and your wife, Ray, had said she was going to pick you up.

7:34Then she said, oh, I haven't left yet. Do you still want me to come? And how did you react? So you have to understand when I was young and stupid at age 70 or 71. Your adolescent years. In my adolescent years. When I was still a promising young man. And I reacted with pain and rage. And when I saw her, when I underwent the ultimate indignity of having to take a taxi home, all of 15, 20 minute ride from the airport, I barely even talked to her. And I kept my distance for about a day until she finally said, knock it off already. so I reacted in other words like a young infant does when they're separated from mother and then on reunion the infant will actually look the other way it was British studies that actually showed that that these young children on prolonged separation from mother when the mother shows up instead of being happy which is what you'd expect are actually distressed they cry their heart rate goes up and often they won't even look at the mother sometimes not even recognize her which is simply a defensive response of the part of the brain that says that you were so hurt when you were abandoned that you'll never be that vulnerable again.

8:42You're going to, John Bowlby, the great British psychiatrist, call this detachment. It's a defensive maneuver on the part of the organism not to be that vulnerable again. Now, that of course parallels my own infant story of five or six weeks separation from my mother. And when I saw her again, I wouldn't even look at her for several days. That shows up 70 years later in my marriage because she's not there for me, the woman I'm relying on. And so I take it as a, it's not how I take it. It's how my organism takes it. As I'm an infant again being rejected. And I react that way. I don't look at her.

9:15So that's the impact of trauma. The past shadows and dominates the present. Explain to us why you were abandoned by your mother. I was just in Budapest last week, a few days ago, and every morning I went to swim at a swim facility on a particular street just around the corner from my hotel. Across the street from the swim facility, I mean directly across the street, as far as that window in this room is from us where we're sitting now, was the house, which was a house of relative refuge for Jews under Swiss protection during the most vicious period of an anti-Semitic government in Budapest, still under the Nazi occupation, where multiple hundreds of people were crowded into a house that might have comfortably housed maybe 100.

10:03the excrement on the floor, the lack of food. My mother took me outside on the very paving stones that are still there and across the swimming pool. And she gave me to a Christian woman who'd come to visit a Jewish friend and asked her to take me to some relatives still under relatively safer conditions, living somewhere else. So this abandonment, as I experienced it, was really her attempt to save my life. Not her attempt, probably her successful endeavor to save my life because I would not have survived under those conditions. I was a very ill 11-month-old. But the abandonment, or at least how the infant's brain interprets the event, which really, when you think about it, was an act of immense love on the part of a 24-year-old young woman to give up her baby to a stranger.

10:48But the infant can only experience it as abandonment. And so when that shadow arises in me, because my wife is not there to meet me, I react like that one-year-old baby that doesn't look at the woman. Mm-hmm. It's so interesting hearing you as an expert in this field, who've devoted so much of your professional life to this raising of awareness, that you have this awareness, but still at the age of 70 or 71, you couldn't immediately act on that awareness. And in a way, I think that that's very reassuring for people to hear that even you will have those moments of being all too human yeah so does the space between awareness and action get narrower well it needs to here's the thing i've written all these books and you know published all over the world and i get people coming up to me saying thank you i read your book and it changed my life and my default response has always been well maybe i should read it myself because to understand something very deeply is not the same as having worked it through yes so the awareness is not enough you know that the Intellectual awareness is not enough.

11:55I mean, one also has to deal with how that emotion and that reaction is still lodged in one's organism. That's what has to be worked through. Knowing what happened, while helpful, is not sufficient. I quote American psychologist called Rollo May, a citation that's often misattributed to another psychiatrist called Viktor Frankl, who wrote the book Man's Search for Me, but Frankl never said it. It was Roland May that said that freedom lies in the capacity between stimulus and reaction to actually choose how I'm going to respond. And what trauma does is it gets rid of that space. There's no space.

12:32There's the stimulus. There's the reaction. And so the actual idea is to widen the gap between stimulus and reaction so that the present self with its awareness can show up. so that the unconscious childhood programming is not pulling your strings like you're a puppet. Fascinating. That's a fascinating definition of trauma. And another one that you've given is that trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you in response to what happens to you. Yeah, so the trauma wasn't that my mother gave me to a stranger. That's what happened to me. That was the traumatic event. But the trauma is the wound that I sustain, which happens inside me, which is that I make the interpretation that I'm being abandoned.

13:12and who gets abandoned? Somebody who's not worth it. Somebody who's worthless. That's who gets abandoned. So then I make the interpretation that the world is not safe and furthermore that I'm just not worth it. I'm not important. I'm not loved. I'm not lovable. That's the trauma, which is a good thing. Because if the trauma was that my mother gave me to a stranger under those terrible conditions, that will never not have happened. Yes. That happened now 77 years ago. It's never not going to have happened. But if the trauma is the interpretation I made of it, that wound of worthlessness or unlovability that I sustained, well, that can be healed at any time.

13:49So it's very important to make that distinction. And it also removes the sting of blame from the parent, which I know you write so much about. That actually it's not what you're saying is not blaming parents and it's not blaming people for their own diseases. It's seeking to explain. It's things to understand, yeah. This may seem, I don't know, heretical or strange to say, but even parents who abuse their kids often love their kids. It's just that that's the best they can do. They don't act lovingly, but it's not that they don't have love. Very few parents lack love for their kids. I'm sure there are such parents in whom the love has been really extirpated by their own traumas.

14:24But all kinds of parents, including myself, who really love their children can still transmit their traumas to them. not for any willing conscious purpose but because we can't help it until we find out otherwise. So many questions I want to ask you. I want to ask you first whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about human nature. Well there's a chapter in the book on human nature and essentially I quote the Stanford University neuropsychologist Robert Sapolsky who says that the essence of our nature is not to be constrained by our nature. Humans are almost infinitely adaptable. We don't have a nature that says, you're going to behave this way.

15:04No, that's the only way you're going to behave. There's no such nature. I mean, if Buddha was a human being, if Hitler was a human being, then what the hell is human nature? On the one hand, this society has a certain definition of human nature, a certain depiction of human nature as being aggressive and competitive and selfish and self-aggrandizing that's in popular language will manifest that when somebody does something particularly dastardly or selfish we say oh that's just human nature at least in north america they use that statement when somebody does something generous or kind we never say oh that's just human nature so that means we have a certain jaded view of human nature there's no such human nature what there is human potential there's human needs when the needs are met that potential is realized and that potential really is to be communal collaborative compassionate creatures that's how we survived that's how we evolved couldn't have evolved otherwise so that if there's a nature it's not determined in a sense that we're obligated by our nature to behave in particular ways it's that we have a nature in the sense that we have certain needs like any creature does you know i mean you might say the analogy i use in the book is an acorn has it in it it's nature to become an oak tree but not under any conditions put it on this wooden table there'll be no oak tree it needs the right soil and irrigation for it to manifest its true nature same with human beings so it's not so much so that there's human nature as a definitive and defined set of characteristics there's human needs and there's human potential and as for any organism any living organism if you want that organism to manifest its potential you have to give with the right conditions, meet its needs.

16:46So that's the sense in which I talk about human nature. How do you feel about failure generally? How do I feel about it? Well, how I feel about it is that I don't like it. What do I think of it? And how do I want to relate to it? It's always a learning opportunity, which is the essence, I think, of what you talk about. And I've never had a failure that didn't end up teaching me something very important that I needed to learn. So from that point of view, there's a wonderful quote that I'd like to read you if I could. So this is one of my spiritual mentors, you might say. Not that I follow any kind of disciplined fashion, but I learned a lot from this guy.

17:19He says, your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They're specifically yours, designed for you by a part of yourself that loves you more than anything else. That part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going to go in the right direction unless there's something pricking you on the side, telling you, look here, this way. That part of you that loves you more than anything else, that part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance.

17:53It will go to extreme measures to wake you up. It will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose. So in that sense, our failures are designed for us by a part of ourselves. That's incredible. To teach us something. I make the same case about a lot of illnesses as well, like these difficulties, these challenges, relationship breakups, whatever they happen to be. They're all designed for us by a part of ourselves that wants us to wake up. And if you don't listen, there'll be more suffering down the line. If you do listen, you move forward. Who's that quote from?

18:27A.H. Olmas. A-L-M-A-A-S. That's his teacher name. His real name is Hamid Ali. And he lives in California. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Just on the illness front, I know that there are some people who take exception to the premise of my podcast because they do not believe that all failures can be easily assimilated, which is absolutely true. But I think there's also a misapprehension that I'm lumping all failures in together. So I'm saying, oh, you can just get over the grief after the loss of a loved one, which I'm not saying at all. And I think that you get that sometimes as well when you talk about illness.

19:04There's a misunderstanding of your work, which is not that you're blaming the patient for their illness. No. I mean, I don't go out of my way, but I certainly make it my way to explain to people that there's no blame attached. But I do say that certain dynamics in people's lives, always as a result of childhood traumatic circumstances, makes us behave in certain ways, makes us take on certain character traits. those character traits that make us function in certain ways in the world which then create stress and that stress causes illness but there's no blame there because no child ever decides to suppress their feelings for example which later on can lead to all kinds of illness but no child ever decides that consciously it's a survival mechanism just like your competitiveness or me trying to compensate for my sense of lack of worthiness by being a workaholic physician that's not a conscious decision on my part.

19:59It's an adaptation. You don't blame people for adaptations they unconsciously took on when they had no choice in the matter. So there's no blame here whatsoever. But it does open up your perspective and mine is the sense of responsibility. So I may not be blamed. I may not be blameworthy. I'm not. But if I understand these dynamics, I can now respond in a new way. I can be responsible. I can now live a different kind of life. That's what the liberation is and that's where failure or very often setbacks in terms of health can function as teachers and lead us back to ourselves brilliant response able i love that and that's why your wife ray can say after you've ignored her for a day knock it off and you can take that on board now yeah and i knocked it off after 24 hours which as i say in the book is a great step forward because years ago it might have been taking me days to knock it off you know so that's a sign of progress Which leads us on to your first failure, actually, which is that as a parent, you failed to provide your children with a home environment where they felt safe and unconditionally loved.

21:04Gabor, that is a huge and brave and honest admission. And I thank you for making it. And what's brave about it? Well, there are lots of people. I'm just pushing it against the brave designation. Yeah, I think there are lots of people who haven't done the work that you've done and still want to project an image of their perfect selves and parenting would be part of that. That means they haven't accepted themselves yet. I mean, preach. You know, it's not a question of bravery. It's just a question of saying this is how it was. You know, not only that, I fully understand that when I talk about these things in myself, people really appreciate it.

21:43They feel permission to be themselves, to examine themselves without shame. you know so there's nothing brave about it all i get is appreciation for it okay well it's very cowardly of you but explain to me why you chose this as your first failure because it's the one that if i could undo anything in my life that's the one i would live over again and owing to my own traumas which i've talked to you about at some length it also means that when we choose our spouses inevitably and only 100 % of the time we choose somebody at the same level of traumatic wounding that we're at which means that now two people who are traumatized are coming together and to the degree to which they haven't worked it out yet by the time they have children almost inevitably they'll pass it on to their kids almost inevitably and so that's what happened so that if at any time you'd ask me would you throw yourself into a fire for the sake of your kids, of course, I would have unhesitatingly, unhesitatingly do so.

22:41But unfortunately, nobody ever needed to throw myself into a fire. They just needed me to be present as a emotionally attuned, self-regulated, present, loving adult. And that, because of my own drives and traumatic legacies, I wasn't capable of doing. My wife being just as traumatized as I was, now you had these two traumatized people in conflict with each other, not knowing how to create a home where there was real safety for our kids.

23:18How many kids do you have? We have three children. And how old were you and your wife when you... I was 30 perhaps, still in medical school. My wife would have been four years younger, 26. And so what was going on for you at this stage? Were you a workaholic? Well at this stage I was a medical student, which immediately meant that I was by definition a workaholic because you cannot be going through medical school unless you really ignore everything but the work. But that wasn't all there was to it. Along with the traumatic imprint of workaholism, there was also poor impulse control on my part.

23:53I had a lot of suppressed anger that would just break out sometimes out of me. One time I hit my wife, one time in my whole life. She was cutting my hair and I was saying something and she said, shut up. She didn't mean all that viciously, but I just reacted violently because my sense of importance was not being wounded, which was precisely my wound. I'm not excusing anything. I'm just saying that's what happened. That never happened again. But as my son Daniel, my co-writer in this book, says when he talks about his own childhood, he used to have a nightmare, that the floor was not the floor, that the floor would just disappear from beneath his feet, But just to say that the emotional atmosphere in the home was so volatile, there could be playfulness and safety and a sense of lovingness, and then all of a sudden there'd be a very tense, conflictual, intraparental situation.

24:47And the young child is sitting through all that, feeling anything but safe. That episode that you recounted where you were violent with your wife, how did you feel after that? Did you immediately recognize it as wrong? Well, that one I recognized pretty quickly. You know, I never did it again. But it just spoke to the degree of suppressed pain and rage that I had. But yeah, I certainly recognized it was wrong. I mean, I never recognized where it came from. And you've spoken before about that sense of conflict with your children and your son Daniel not singing happy birthday to you and you hit him.

25:26I ended up hitting him, that's, yeah. Are these moments, now that you look back on them, Do they come from wounded ego? Well, what is the ego? The ego is kind of a very fragile structure that we develop. You can talk about the ego as a health ego, which is just our sense of self that's capable in making decisions and executive functions and reacting in a sane way to the world. But a wounded ego is very fragile and is always trying to protect itself and is always trying to aggrandize itself. so my three-year-old son militantly refuses to sing happy birthday to me i'm getting the sense again that i'm not worthy that i'm not lovable and that won't hurt so much end up taking my anger on my little boy that's what happened how did you work through all of that how long did it take you oh it took me 10 minutes 20 minutes you know and i mean look when when you you had a child, you realize that you're off base.

26:26So by the time you got home, I said, look, Daniel, please have your birthday cake. You don't have to sing anything. And my three-year-old son phoned every relative that was at that birthday party, and he called my parents and his other grandparents and my brothers and their wives and said, I had the cake and I didn't have to sing, you know? So that happened right away. But as to what made me do it, so the wrongness of what I had done, I mean, the shame of it flooded me almost immediately but why I had done it and where that impulse came from that took me much longer to understand and it's really been your life's work that's been my life's work to understand that and in that sense the failure with my own children has been a by the way by talking about my failure to provide a safe environment for them I'm not saying that they're failures you know you know they're wonderful beings but that really was an impetus for me to learn about trauma and about child development because if I could behave that way quite contrary to my deepest urges to nurture them and to love them there had to be some reason for it either I was just randomly troubled or there was some reason why I was so troubled that I would behave in these troubling ways.

27:38So do you think you've become a better parent the older you've become? Well I'm a much better parent now to my adult children than I ever was to my young children much much better Having to do that internal work also allowed me to learn a lot that I've been able to teach the rest of the world, those that will listen anyway. And in that sense, people who follow my work have benefited from that failure, as I have in terms of learning about myself. I'm a much wiser and insightful and non-intrusive parent and loving parent than I used to be. Loving not in the sense of how much love I felt for my children, but how loving I'm able to be in action.

28:14Yes, consistent action. Yeah. And have you ever apologized to your children? Oh, till the cars come home. I mean, actually, they got sick of hearing the apologies because a lot of that apology came from a sense of guilt, and nobody wants to be seen as somebody else's guilt. My children don't want to be seen through a lens of, I failed. Nobody else wants to be somebody else's failure. So in my family, those apologies were made to the point where almost too compulsively, actually, because it took me a long time to let go of the guilt. I mean, I had the insight, but it took me a long time to let go of the guilt.

28:47So they didn't want to hear that too much anymore. Do you love yourself? Well, I can talk about that in two senses. One is inaction. So when you love somebody, it's not enough that you have a feeling of love. I mean, when people talk about self-love, they think we're talking about some gooey, new-age concept. It isn't. What it actually is, when you love somebody, you'll extend yourself to support their growth. And that's not my definition. F. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Travel, he talks about love as when you're willing to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of the other. So do I extend myself to support my own growth?

29:23I do. I look after myself reasonably well. Not that you'd notice on this book tour, but even there, you know. So there's that active sense of love. Do I act lovingly towards myself? Much more than I used to, for sure. In an experiential sense of do I feel love towards myself. I haven't much, except earlier this year. I talked about this experience once before, and it's not in this book, because the book was done by the time this experience happened. But I was taking part in a psychedelic ceremony with some indigenous Canadians who have a horrific history, if anybody knows anything about Canadian history and British colonialism, knows how devastatingly these people were treated and what the continued impact that is.

30:05So because they knew my work with healing, and I talk a lot about indigenous issues in Canada, and because they knew I worked with psychedelics, they invited me to a ceremony to help support their work. And so we used psilocybin, magic mushrooms. I took a rather heroic dose, which is, that's me because I have a very thick skull and it's hard to break through it. And I experienced self-love, not as a concept and not as action, but just as a state of being. that here I am, just here I am, and nothing more is needed. I had that experience. Now, has that stayed with me? I think the impact of it has.