Moment 210: Dr. Gabor Maté: Your Trauma Is Secretly Controlling You! (Until You Try This)

0:01The Direvcio's brought you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive .com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states. Speaking about our early experiences, the first word in this sort of subtitle of your book is the word trauma.

0:34It's a word that I've talked about a lot on this podcast and I've had a lot of people here that have opened up about their traumas. How do you define trauma? I know society's defined it in its own way, but how do you define it? I define it very specifically. It's not something bad that happens to you. It's not that... I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized. It says, no, you weren't. You were just sad or you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized. Trauma means a wound. That's the literal meaning of the word. It's a Greek word for wounding. So trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain and it behaves like a wound.

1:13So on the one hand, it wound if it's very raw, if you touch it, it just really hurts. So if I have a wound around not being wanted, then or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound. So in one sense, trauma is an unhealed wound that touched, you get triggered. That's what triggering means, by the way. So an old wound gets activated or touched. The other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over. And scar tissue has certain characteristics. It's thick. It has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling in it.

1:54So people traumatized this connector for their feelings. Scar tissue is rigid, it's not flexible. So we lose kind of response flexibility. So when something happens, we tend to react in typical stereotypical, predictable, dysfunctional ways, because of the rigidity, and scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh. So people are traumatized, tend to be stuck in emotional states that characterized their development when they were traumatized. So when somebody says to you, don't be such a baby, it doesn't sound very pleasant, but there's some truth to it. It means that you're probably reacting a corner of the lines of some wound that you sustained as an infant.

2:37And all you're reacting is if that wound was happening all over again. This is what one of my friends in the trauma world, Peter Levine calls the tyranny of the past. So something happens in the present, and we react as if we're back there in the past when this first happened. And we're not in the present moment at all. And I was trying to figure out how many people as a percentage of the population have a trauma. But then I read this stat with 60 % of adults say that they've had a traumatic early upbringing or whatever, or traumatic events from their childhood. But then I thought maybe everybody has trauma.

3:16It depends on how we understand trauma. So if we understand trauma, there's only the really terrible things that happen to people, which do happen to people. You know, in the book I talked about a British friend of mine about no living in Canada. They are a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher and a psychologist and an artist actually. And they grew up in some orphanage in Britain where they were racially taunted every morning. You know, words that are in the book by her permission, which I'm not going to cite here publicly. And that gives a sense of deficient, a sense of self that I'm just not good enough that I don't belong and so on.

3:57There's those obvious traumas or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused. So men who are sexually abused, according to Canadian study, have tripled the rate of hard attacks as adults. And all kinds of physiological reasons, but that should be the case. So there's those self -evident, big T traumas that we call big T -trum, T with a capital T, trauma with a capital T. There's a certain percentage of the population, much larger than we think, subject to that. If you include all the known factors such as physical, sexual or emotional abuse, spanking, by the way, has not been shown to be as traumatic as harsher forms of physical abuse, spanking which is still recommended by so -called experts, who should remain a name for the moment.

4:48The death of a parent, violence in a family, violence, parental violence against each other, a parent being jailed, a parent being mentally ill. Did I say a parent being addicted at a rancor's divorce? These are the identified big traumas, big T -trumas. Not to mention poverty, not to mention extreme inequality, war and so on. But then, if you remember that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you, it's the wound. People can be wounded, not just by bad things happening to them, but small children can be wounded in loving families, where they don't get their needs met. I mean, that's obvious in a physical sense, if a child doesn't get proper nutrition, that body will suffer, the mind will suffer.

5:41We're also creatures with emotional needs as important as our physical needs. So when the child's emotional needs are not met, that child is wounded. And that's what we call small T -trumma, which is not the big ticket events, such as I described, but just the child's need to be loved unconditionally, to be held when distressed, to be responded, to be seen, to be heard, to be allowed their full range of emotion without them being stamped on in a name of so -called discipline. The right to play creatively, spontaneously, out there in nature, not with these damn digital gadgets that subvert and hijack the child's imagination.

6:27But spontaneous play, that's essential for brain development. So what I'm saying is that when needs are not for the unconditional loving attachment relationship, when those needs are frustrated, children are also hurt. And I call that trauma as well, because it shows up later in life as the impact of painful wounds. So trauma in this society, for all kinds of reasons, is far more common than we imagine. From sitting here and speaking to, I don't know, somewhere over a hundred different people that come from all walks of life, but specifically people that are successful in their industries, and you talked about, you know, how an anomalous early upbringing can create sort of abnormality in an adult.

7:10A lot of the people I sit here are successful because of some kind of abnormality, or at least their interpretation of some kind of early event that caused them to have some sort of abnormal belief about themselves, that they're not enough, so they become a billionaire or a gold medalist or whatever it might be. One of the things that I thought I could predict is, I thought I could, if they told me, I thought after doing a hundred episodes, if they told me the traumatic event they've been through, I could predict the outcome in them. But there's a disconnect there, because, you know, I'd sit here with a guest who went through one of your capital, capital T traumas, like domestic violence, and one of them might become incredibly angry, and one of them might become the most peaceful, loving person I've ever met.

7:54And that taught me that there's this thing in between the event, which is what you call interpretation. And I found that really, I found that as, that kind of makes it really difficult to diagnose. Well, no, look, so the two examples you gave, that really peaceful person, maybe really peaceful for genuinely good reasons, such as they found the mokov human love flowing through their veins and they've had some spiritual reconciliation with the world, where they made them let genuinely learn to compassion for themselves and others, but they could also be very nice and peaceful because they're suppressing their healthy anger, because they're actually sitting on their rage unconsciously, which is going to show up in a form of some kind of health manifestation I guarantee you later on.

8:40So you can't tell from the outside without asking some questions, or I can give you the example of a Donald Trump, who had a really traumatic childhood. I mean, his father was a, as described by his psychologist, Nees, Mary Trump, his father, Trump's father, who is Mary's grandfather, was a psychopath, and who really demeaned and harshly treated their children. So Trump decides unconsciously that, by the way, I'm not talking about his policies here, I'm not, this is not a political debate. And in the book, I pointed out that his opponent was also traumatized, Hilli Clinton said, this is a ecumenical view of trauma in politics, I'm not choosing sides.

9:30I'm just saying that you can see his trauma in every moment he opens his mouth. His grandiarsities need to make himself bigger, more powerful, aggressive, and eats, as much as said in his autobiography, that the world is a horrible place, a doggy dog place, where everybody will have to you, everybody wants your wife and your house and your wealth, and this is your friends, never mind your enemies. That's the world he lives in. Now that world that he lives in reflects his childhood home. He developed that world view. He came to it honestly, you might say, because that's the world that he lived in.

10:03And he gets to be really successful in this crazy world, you know, financially, although people question, you know, was he really as big a success as he says he was, but he certainly was successful politically, if by success you mean the attainment of power. His brother on the other hand, Mary Trump's father, Trump's niece's father, drank himself to death, and there were both responses to the same. You can never say it's exactly the same for two kids, but there was a toxic home environment, one ends up dead as an alcoholic, the other ends up at the pinnacle of power. And when I look at them both, I see this function there, a significant dysfunction there.

10:52So one of the, one of those, the consequences of that early upbringing was it materialized itself as sort of addiction. And the other got the same psychological reinforcement, or the thing missing from power and work and money. Well, Donald Trump learned that the way to survive is to be aggressive and harsh and competitive and to get the other before they get to you, which is a faithful reproduction of his early childhood experiences. So for him, these were not choices so much as survival techniques. And when they talk about his lying, well, I don't know when he's lying or when he's not, but my sense is that often he actually believes what he's saying.

11:39And actually he's a biographer or the person who co -wrote his quasi -autobiography, called the out of the deal. This writer says that he's never met anybody who's so capable of believing something that's not true, to be true, if he wants it to be true. But that's the mark of a traumatized child, you know, a denial of reality. It is an inauguration. There was a certain number of people that came today. He couldn't stand it, that there weren't as many people there as came to Berk Obamas inauguration. There were much smaller number of people there. He created this reality where many more people came to his inauguration.

12:23Now, what age behavior is that? That's a foiled, where more kids came to his party than my party. That can't be true. But that's Donald's way of dealing with reality. It's not a moral failing as such. That's how he survived. And these survival mechanisms then get to former personalities. And again, in this world, sometimes they pay off in certain ways. Is that often the case with pathological liars, they've learnt to lie as a way to survive? Oh, absolutely. The German philosopher, writer Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche said, people lie their way of reality who have been hurt by reality. And so I've lied.

13:10You know, like when I had my show up in addiction, I relied every day to my wife. And even afterwards, when she stopped trying to change my behavior, I said, just tell me, if you're going to show up, you're going to spend another $1 ,000 in music, just tell me, I still couldn't. Because I was so ashamed of it. And so the lying became like a way of survival for me. Defense against reality. It's a defense against reality and it's a defense against being judged. Well, that says something about my childhood. No one is born a liar. As we say in this book, there are congenial liars, but there are no congenital liars.

13:59No one they will baby tells any lies. No one they will baby pretends anything. If we end up pretending in any way at all to the extent that we do, it's because we have to learn that's what we must do to survive. You said something at the start when I gave the example that I have this, I sat with a guest here who went through domestic abuse and they are the calmest person. And then you said, well, maybe they're suppressing it. And in fact, the minute you said that, it reminded me of something they said, which is they said to me on this podcast that they had angry outbursts all the time. So sometimes their child will come up to them and want to play when they're working and they'll snap.

14:41And they're trying to, they're trying to deal with that. Yeah, that's what I meant, that they're sitting on this creative, volcanic crater of anger, which sometimes birds out of them. So their demeanor is like a really developed, suppressed way of handling rage, which rage when they were children had they expressed, would have got them into more trouble. So suppressing it, repressing it became their survival. It's all about survival, you see. So it became their survival mechanism. No, that person, as long as they keep it that way, they're at risk. They're at risk for mental health diagnosis like depression.

15:30Because what is depression? It means you're pushing something down. That's what it means. What do we push down? Or natural emotions? Why do we push them down? Because we have to survive. So that person, I don't know, I can't prognosticate what's going to happen to them. But if they don't work it out, in general, they're at risk for some kind of mental or physical manistization, that's my experience. You've said before, before this book, that awareness is the starting point. Yeah. I've found that to be so true in my life, but it's not very easy. I feel like awareness is a luxury or a privilege that is very hard for it.

16:07Because you're guessing. You're guessing based on pattern recognition. So I was guessing 25 years old, I can't get into relationship. Anytime a girl comes near me, even if I've pursued her, I run off. And to figure out why I was doing that, to even identify the behavior pattern and go, that's not helpful. That's not going to lead me to feeling whole. Where does that come from? Took 25 years and a lot of like introspection. But most people, they're living unaware of their lipid master of trauma that is driving their life. That's a really good analogy. The trauma really is like a puppet master behind the scenes or in the unconscious, pulling your strings and you're not aware of it.

16:48Do you remember Pinocchio? Yeah. So you remember what Pinocchio says at the end when he finally becomes a real boy? Yeah. He says how fully she was when I was a puppet. And to the extent that we're being activated by these unconscious strings that are traumas pulling behind the scenes and we're acting in our lives and we think we're autonomous free beings. But we're actually being controlled by something in the past that we haven't worked out. We're puppets. We're actually puppets. And there's not much freedom in that. There's no freedom in it at all. So I mean, I suppose the opposite of trauma, if you want to revisit that question, is liberation?

17:33Interesting. Liberation and by reconnection. By reconnection, but liberation from the inexorable power of the unconscious. Which is like cutting the strings in a way. It kind of brings me to, there's kind of two ways I want to go with that. The first question I have about trauma and the puppet master analogy is, do we ever really cut the strings? Or do we just kind of learn to pull against them when they try and tell us to do something with more force than they're exerting in the opposite direction? That doesn't work very well pushing against it because there's still reactive. You're still not in charge.

18:11You're just in automatic resistance mode to something. There's no freedom in that either. So, yeah. But awareness that you mentioned is huge because once you aware that there's this, see the thing about these strings may not afraid right away. But once you wear that, ah, this reaction of mine, it's not about what's going on right now. There's something old being activated here. That awareness alone weakens the, it slackens the strings a bit. No, you know, they no longer is taught. They no longer is automatically capable of pulling on you. So, it does have to be, being in the awareness of them.

18:58Ultimately, if we realize that this puppet master is just a desperate little person trying to get you to survive, the only way he, she, they knew how when you were small, when they were small, if you make friends with it, but we relieve it of its duties. I think thanks very much, but I can handle it now. It eventually becomes a friend rather than sort of our master. On that first step of just acknowledging, just understanding that there is a puppet master, they're controlling us, and exactly which strings that puppet master is pulling in our lives. How does one go about awareness, the process of awareness?

19:39Is that, I mean, is it introspection keeping a diary therapy? What is it? Well, all that. I mean, all of any. But even when you ask how you go about it, what is the it? Well, for you to say how to go about it, you already must have something to give awareness. If you didn't, you wouldn't even be asking the question. So, that's the very first step of realizing that there's something here to work on. There's something here to work through. It does not need to be the way it is. That already is the biggest step. La Buddha said that to recognize the source of your suffering is the first step towards relieving the suffering.

20:14And so, as soon as you ask how you go about it, you already take it as a huge step. Because a lot of people don't even know that there's an it. They just think this is a reality, that this is life. So realizing that this it doesn't have to be the way it is. That's already a huge step. No. Beyond that, yoga, meditation, nature, therapy of all kinds, bodywork of all kinds, like like like somatic experiencing or or creating a sacred treatment or even massage therapy. It's incredible what can be revealed just through bodywork like that. Then all kinds of forms of therapy, the ones I teach, the ones other people teach.

21:06Journaling, certain exercises in this book that we recommend, like just ask yourself where you have troubles saying no in life, two things you don't really want to do. And working not through on a regular basis. So, there's lots of ways once you open the door. You know, I've a chapter on psychedelics here, which is, again, it's not like a panacea or for everyone, but certainly it's a helpful modality for a lot of people. So, some people may actually benefit from taking pharmaceutical medications if their situation is dire enough. But not as the final answer, but as a way of getting respite that allowed them to go to work on real issues that caused them to be depressed or anxious or tuning out.

21:51You know, so any and all of these things.

22:00The Diro of Cios brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto -polices. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit Progressive .com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.