Why You Feel Lost in Life: Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma & How to Heal

30:02and they'll try to be nice and cooperative and they'll try to fit in with other people's expectations, which then means they'll be stressed all the time, which then potentially is all kinds of illness. You know, I am sitting here thinking about ways in which I can try to distill down what you're saying because the information has been so life-changing for me in my own life to really accept, acknowledge, and seek to understand how childhood experiences created a traumatic response inside of me. And I want to focus on the, I guess you would call it the smaller T stuff, which is that you have fundamental needs as a child.

30:49And when they are not provided to you, that it creates trauma inside of you. And is it fair to say that another way to think about trauma is that it's something happening outside of you that creates this almost like alarm or bracing in your body? It's like it kind of flips you into that fight or flight. Because I have this experience of not going back through my childhood and not like seeing anything that's massive related to my parents, but just having this sense of constantly being on edge, constantly feeling like, you know, it's my job to make everybody happy. Don't say the wrong thing. This hypervigilance.

31:31And I never knew where it came from. Yeah. Well, the child is very sensitive to the parents' emotional states. And even if, for example, you can, one of the ways you can tell if a marriage is troubled is you can ask the parents or you can measure the child's stress hormone levels. So the stresses of the parents are directly affecting the child's physiology and the child's psychology. So you may not have articulated and clearly see what was going on, but especially if you're a sensitive person genetically, and that is genetic sensitivity, you'll feel exactly what's going on and you'll think it's all about you and then you also develop the belief that it's your job to fix it and then when you can't fix it you'll have to cement a sense of guilt and shame because you failed at your job of making your parents happy which never should have been the child's job in the first place what is a child supposed to do about what just as you're growing up it's interesting because i think so many people at least in my life and my lived experience is that that that's my job to protect myself to like make everybody happy but but you see that's how you survived because what you needed most of all is a relationship with your parents and one of the needs of children that i haven't mentioned is what we can call a rest because in a rest state we can develop and grow and unfold now rest means the child doesn't have to work to make the relationship work with the parent the relationship is just there there's nothing the child can do to break the relationship now in a situation where that's not the case then the child necessarily has to work to make the relationship work because without that relationship they know they can't survive.

33:22So that adaptation, the hypervigilance on your part, remember I said in the beginning that nobody's damaged goods? So that hypervigilance on your part, and that belief that it's your job to make the situation peaceful, that's an adaptation on your part. So that's a form of trauma. That's an outcome of trauma. The problem is that that becomes then wired into your personality. But children don't have any choice in the matter. They have to adapt to this situation. Those adaptations, they become wired into their personalities, and that's who they think they are. That's not who they are. Those are their adaptations, their trauma showing up in their behavior and in their emotional functioning.

34:07One of the ways that I've seen people really deny the existence of trauma inside a family is between siblings, where two siblings will grow up in the same household and be like, well, that never happened, or mom wasn't like that, or you're just being too sensitive. In your work, what have you discovered about how siblings can grow up in the same house? No siblings grow up in the same house. No siblings have the same parents. No siblings have the same family. No siblings have the same childhood. Why not? There are a whole lot of reasons. Number one, there's the birth order. Parents don't relate to the first child the way they relate to the second child.

34:47Then there's gender differences. Parents don't relate to, I'm not talking about whether parents love the kids or not. I'm talking about what actually happens. The child doesn't experience the parents' love. The child experiences the way the parent shows up. So, number one, number two, the parents' relationship might be in a different phase, one child than another. The parents might be in a different economic situation. The parents' lives might be different. then each child will evoke a different response from the parent like with my three kids or your three kids but yeah you have three children yeah you have two daughters and a son I have two sons and a daughter it's not that I loved or we loved any one of them more than the other but we responded to them differently and there's one more factor which is children born with different temperaments which is they experience the world differently so even if I could be the same parent to all my kids which I couldn't be, they still have three different parents because they would experience me differently.

35:44Well, you know, I am sitting here listening again, kind of from two places, one as a mother, right? And one as a human being who was a daughter who has recognized that there were lots of small things that happened. And one big thing that created a tremendous, this, like a traumatic response inside me that created hypervigilance and anxiety and probably ADHD. And I'm also thinking, and I'm going to share this because I think it'll be really helpful, that I had a wildly traumatic birth. I was two weeks overdue. They had to induce me here in Boston. And my daughter Sawyer, who is sitting outside this studio and worked on the Let Them theory book with me.

36:29She did not want to come out. So it was 36 hours. They had to use a forceps didn't work. They ended up doing a vacuum extraction. And then I tore and I got rushed to emergency surgery and lost two and a half liters of blood. And they sent Sawyer home with Chris. They kept me in the hospital. And by the time I went home, my skin was as gray as a dolphin. and I had severe postpartum depression. Yeah. And the kind, Gabor, where I could not be alone with her because I was in such a depressive and scary state and I was on medications that made it completely unsafe for me to breastfeed her. I understand.

37:18And for the first 10 weeks of her life, I was a zombie on medication. And, oh my God, it just like kills me. to think about this. And she's recently gone into therapy and has started doing EMDR. Yeah. And one of her visions, when they kind of trace responses to stressful things in the moment, and it goes all the way back to the first vision, is a vision that she has where she's in her crib. Yeah. and she really wants me to come. Yeah. And it's my husband, and then it's my mother, and then it's my mother-in-law, and then it's my friend Joni that would sit with me while Chris went to work, and I never came.

38:04Yeah. So we went through the same thing with one of our children. And my wife had a severe post-bonded depression. She couldn't even look at the kid. So let me say a couple of things here. One is that sometimes birth trauma happens, you know, but yours was severe. Now birth was created by nature in a certain way. During the birth process, there's natural hormones that are released, both in the mother and the infant. It's been called a love cocktail. It's a combination of internal opiates and oxytocin and other brain chemicals, which create the bonding between the mother and the infant. Now sometimes medical intervention is life-saving and essential.

38:49But we've medicalized birth so much that we interfere with it so much now that we're creating a lot of birth trauma where it's not necessary. I'm not saying that was the case in your situation, but nevertheless, we're doing it a lot, you know. And that interferes with mother and child bonding, number one. Number two, the child does have this need to stay with the mother's body for many months because a human child is the least developed and the least mature and the most dependent of any mammal. And the maturation, like a horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings can't do that for a year and a half.

39:26The horse is a year and a half ahead of us in terms of brain development. That's because we develop these big brains, these big heads. If we waited any more than nine months, we would never get born. Sometimes even now we barely get born because the head gets stuck, which is probably what happened in your case. which means that the development that in other animals happens in the womb, and human beings have to happen outside the womb. That's been called exterogestation. There's interogestation in the womb and exterogestation outside the womb. Now that means the mother's body, the mother's skin, the mother's heartbeat close to the baby for many, many, many months.

40:06So when that doesn't happen, and in the U.S., 25 % of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which is a massive abandonment. Now, they don't do it because they want to. They have to do it for economic reasons. It's a massive abandonment of children. So there's the birth trauma and its impacts. Then there's the mother's depression, and that has an impact on infants. So people, kids whose mothers were depressed postpartum, have a high risk of ADHD. and we can talk about why that's the case. Why is that the case? Because all three of my children have ADHD. Well, I can tell you what I said.

40:46The first book I ever wrote, Scattered Minds, was on ADHD after I was diagnosed. And we can talk about that, but let me just say it now. That's just the case and we can discuss it. They've done electroencephalograms on six-month-old infants whose mother was depressed and whose mother was not depressed. You could tell from the EEG of the infant whose mother is depressed and whose is not. Not because the depressed mother loves the child any less or is any iota less devoted than the non-depressed mother, but because the depressed mother can't respond to the infant with the same smiling, playful, attuned interaction which the child needs for healthy brain development.

41:32It's a sacred thing. And society needs to hold it sacred. Now how mothers used to develop or raise children is in the community, where they gave birth in the community, where there were doulas, where, no, mind you, they didn't have the advantages of modern medicine, which again, I'm not dismissing. I'm just talking about how we evolved. Right. And there was such a thing as aloe mothering. Other mothers would come and support the mother. When a mother needed to rest, other women would come and hold the baby. And mothers are left very much on their own in this society. And that depression in the mother then affects the child's brain development.

42:15Not only that, given that we develop a sense of ourselves based on how the adults look at us. When the mother or the parents can't look at the child or can't hold the child, again the child begins to feel there's something wrong with them. It feels like there's a million ways for this to actually happen. Well, there is. And I share the story because it's true. I was a completely different mother when I gave birth to our second child, Kendall, just 19 months later. Yeah. And Chris and I were different. And so I can see how without any ill intention, you are a very different parent. Absolutely. And the child is a very different child.

42:57And the child is one of the different temperament. Correct. So they experience you differently to start with. So how does this sort of unresolved trauma from childhood that I would imagine, you know, a lot of us learn about this as an adult, and then we start to recognize that this is an explanation for a lot of the patterns of behavior that you don't really like, but you're not quite sure how to get control of them. How does unresolved trauma impact the way that you deal with stress as an adult? So the body's stress regulation apparatus, which is physiological, it has to do with the connection between certain brain centers down to the adrenal gland, which is the stress gland, you might say.

43:45No child is born with stress regulation. Infants don't know how to regulate their stresses. Well, neither do adults. Well, as you say in your book, most adults are eight years old. If that, but I thought that was pretty generous. This might have been three or four years old. Well, stress regulation, like other functions, has to develop. So that when something stressful happens, I know how to face it without being overwhelmed. And that depends on the development of these brain circuits and receptors for brain chemicals. now trauma interferes with the development of the body stress regulation apparatus so that become adults and we don't know how to handle stress and then we seek escape so one of ways that people escape from stress is addictive behaviors you know for example if you talk about or talk to addicts if you i feel like i'm my own addictive behaviors even if i go quote-unquote sober for a while and then i relapse what usually happened is that i got stressed and then I reach for that addictive outlet as a way of soothing my stress.

44:48So that's how it shows up. But physiologically it shows up by a dysregulation of the body's stress regulation apparatus. So it's not just psychological, we're talking physiology. And you've done these studies in laboratory animals where the way the mother handles that infant rat pup in the first few days of life will have an impact on the adult rat's capacity to handle stress. And if you take the rats, by the way, whose mothers don't have them as well, and you put them with mothers who do, their brains develop normally. So it's not a genetic effect. It's what's called an epigenetic effect. It's the environment acting on the genes.

45:31Which is why we come back to your original point. No human being is damaged goods. No. The good news is that if you can recognize that your response to stress and traumatic situations and overwhelming emotional situations is something that you can identify and change, that that's what the opportunity is here in terms of being able to heal and resolve trauma. Absolutely. And especially if you begin by recognizing that it's not your fault. There's nothing wrong with you. You know, when I think about my husband who absolutely experienced trauma by having a dad that was a workaholic and never around and narcissistic personality style and lots of drinking and stress in the marriage, right?

46:20And his response to stress is to just shut down. Yeah. The man goes silent and stoic. And in our marriage, one of the things that have come up a lot, which you can direct line to his response to his own childhood, is he doesn't really know what his needs are because they weren't met. That's right. And for him, it took a long time to call that trauma from his childhood because he's like, well, I had food. My parents were there. I know. Went to school. It's not like they beat me. I know. And for me, I am the opposite. I'm a reactor. Like I'm a human volcano. Yeah. And when I get dysregulated or triggered or upset or overwhelmed, I'm like, ah!

47:10And it's even though I know this. Yeah. And I've been working on it. And I am a completely different human being. I feel that way over the last three years. Yeah. I still erupt. Well, join a club. And so how do you personally navigate your daily challenges and when you get overwhelmed by stress? So let me say something about Chris first, if I may. Yes, please. When he says that I wasn't beaten or we weren't starving, I had food and therefore I wasn't traumatized. Here's what I would say to him. So listen, Chris, let's take one of your kids and let's say you were an alcoholic, which means that you came home in different moods all the time.

47:57And the kids couldn't rely on who dad was going to be for one minute to the next. And your mom was constantly stressed. And if you were this way, do you think your kids wouldn't be hurt by that? So just plug your kid into the situation that you're in. And if one of your kids came to you and said, dad, I don't like it that you're drinking and you're behaving this way or that way. and you were working all like never around, would you say to your kid, well, there's food on the table. What are you complaining about? No, but I did. Yeah. No, that happened in our house like 15 years ago. Okay. And he felt bad and I was an asshole.

48:33Oh, okay. Again, more trauma and more pain passing on to our kids. Yeah, I'm just saying that when people look at their own childhoods, they kind of minimize. Why do we do that? Because it was too painful to accept in the first place. So that people dissociate and they disconnect from their bodies and their feelings. Now you said that he had a hard time feeling what he feels. That itself is a trauma impact. It's a protection. It's not a flaw. It's not a damage. It's an adaptation. If I was hurting you right now and you couldn't escape and you couldn't fight back and you couldn't ask for help, then dissociating and not experiencing your feelings would be your only protection but then it gets wired into you and then all your life you go through not knowing what you feel and not knowing what your needs are so again it's an adaptation that's what i'm saying is that nobody's good these are just adaptations the abnormality is not an individual it's in the circumstances to which the individual had to respond that way so that his response or yours, or mine for that matter, were perfectly normal responses to abnormal circumstances.

49:49I say abnormal in a sense, circumstances that did not meet human needs. Dr. Mate, this feels like a good time to take a quick pause so we can hear a word from our sponsors. And while you're listening to our sponsors, please share this episode with people that you love. absolutely every human being deserves and needs to hear this life-changing information from Dr. Mate. And don't go anywhere because when we return, Dr. Mate and I will be waiting for you after this short break to keep digging into this important topic. So stay with us.

50:33welcome back it's your friend mel robbins and today you and i are getting to spend time with the extraordinary dr gabor mate so dr mate one of the things that's coming to mind is thinking back to my own life and the moment where I first bumped into your work and I learned that the seemingly little things created a lasting impact. And that even though I wasn't to blame for the emotional volatility or the emotional shutdown in my parents when I was growing up, that it impacted me, it was real, and it was my responsibility to heal and to decide whether or not I wanted to do the work to change the way that it impacted me.

51:28Because it did have a massive impact on my behaviors, constantly feeling on edge, people-pleasing, anxiety, ADHD, drinking too much, chasing success as a way to prove that I was worthy of something and to make other people happy. Yes. It was everywhere. Yeah. It honestly just defined how I ran on default. And I remember the moment though, when I started to truly accept the fact that these were all indications of trauma. Yeah. And that if I wanted my life to feel different. Yeah. That I needed to lean into everything that you're saying. Yeah. And I felt a lot of conflict about that moment because I felt guilty for identifying it that way because I know my parents were just doing the best that they did.

52:17They did. And that there was a lot that I didn't remember. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you could just talk to the person who's listening who is having that awakening for the first time where they're really accepting that some of the behaviors and the negative self-talk and the anxiety that this is a result of experiences that you had as a child where you were not given the things that you needed. Now, there's a lot in what you said. Okay, first you said you behave that way by default. There's a difference between default and fault. Okay, default, you didn't know you were doing it. You didn't know any better.

53:00You were just following patterns that were programmed into you, but it's not your fault. Okay, there's a huge difference, an important distinction. Number one. Number two, it's never the child's job to make the parents happy or to create peace in the family. And the child invariably fails, which instills a huge sense of guilt and inadequacy for not having fulfilled a task that never should have been yours in the first place. It's a reversal of roles, because whose job it is to hold who emotionally, to create peace. and so when a child is forced into that position again as an adaptation the main relationship with the parents she's given an impossible task that she's bound to fail at and bound to feel shame over it which means that any shame and guilt that you feel is completely undeserved when we start to noticing these patterns we can start asking ourselves questions but it depends on how we ask them so I could say why am I behaving this way?

54:04Is that a question? No, it's an indictment. It's an indictment. But I said, hmm, I wonder why I'm behaving that way. So we need to begin to develop that compassionate curiosity towards the self, where we start looking, not to why did I, not this indictment, as you say, but genuine curiosity. And from that perspective, everything, pretty much everything anybody thinks is wrong with them is actually because it's an adaptation or it begins as a failure of development because the conditions for development were not adequate. And so then we can understand, no, it's not a question of being victims. That's the last thing we want to do is to foster victim mentality.

54:50They did this to me and I can't help it. No, that happened and it's your responsibility and it's your capacity to change that now. So you have to drop the victim mode altogether, but that doesn't mean that we don't recognize what happened so to say that stuff happened to you and i get the sense that something big happened that you haven't articulated yet but something big happened to you at some point um to recognize that is not to say that you're a victim it's just to say that whatever happened had certain impacts and fostered certain adaptations on your part that made you behave and undermine your development in certain way oh i'll share it with you.

55:28When I was in the fourth grade, I woke up in the middle of the night on a family vacation and an older kid was on top of me. Okay. All right. And that had massive implications on my life. When were we? I was fourth grade and I was sound asleep. So I was in a safe space, wake up to an older kid on top of me who was fondling me. Okay. And in the scheme of things that can happen, it was, here I go dismissing it. You're looking at me. You're like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't go there. Okay, okay. But it's almost like I'm shaming myself for having trauma about this. No, can I unpack this for you a little bit?

56:12Sure. Are you open to it? Oh, I'm so open to it. Yeah. Okay. Here's the question I'm going to ask you. Okay. How did you feel when this happened? I felt very confused and scared. Confused and scared. Good enough. Who did you speak to about it? No one. Okay. Now, if something like this happened to one of your daughters in grade, was it grade four? Yeah. Okay. If one of these things happened to Sawyer or Kendall in grade four, and if they didn't talk to you, how would you explain that? I'd feel, how would I explain it? I would explain it, and I'm about to go intellectual. I personally, as the mother, would feel heartbroken.

56:53I understand how you'd feel, but really I'm not asking how you'd feel. I'm asking how you'd explain it. Why wasn't my daughter talking to me about feeling scared and confused and violated? Because she didn't feel safe talking to me. That's the trauma. The trauma began before that happened. Because if you had been able to talk to your parents, and they would have said, this is awful, You must feel terrible. Come here, let me hold you. And let's deal with the situation. So the trauma is not only in what happened, it's that you were so alone when it happened. And that aloneness was yours before this traumatic event ever occurred.

57:31As a matter of fact, abusers can tell with almost laser-like accuracy who's defended and protected and who's not, who can be victimized and who cannot. so that your primary traumatic event was not this event. Not that this wasn't traumatic. Of course, it was hugely traumatic, but it became hugely traumatic because you were alone. And that sense of lack of safety and lack of protection. Furthermore, you may not even have wanted to bother your parents because they're already stressed enough already. You were protecting them. That's the primary traumatic situation. I've never looked at it like that.

58:12Yeah. Do you see that one? Oh, a thousand percent. And I can also see when I think about experiences that friends have shared with me where they did say something. Yeah. And then there was denial. There was dismissal. Or dismissal. Or we're not going to tell anybody. Or this stays within us. Yeah. Or even if they then go after the person and confront it, it blows up and somehow you're to blame. And so I can see how. That's right. Yeah. And of course, when you shove it down, you then think you've done something wrong. And that was the other thing that happened for me is that I felt like I had done something wrong.

58:49That's one of the impacts of trauma is that shame-based view of the self, that people start blaming themselves, that somehow you invited it or deserved it, or you didn't fight back hard enough, which if you didn't was also self-protection. Well, I think that was one of the original moments that at least that I remember where I literally left my body and disassociated. Which was a defense. Yes. So again, it's an adaptation. So that's what I would say about that incident. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, but again, the problem is in the environment, in the lack of being held and being seen. So there's nothing in your initial impulse when you began that narrative about how it's not as bad as what happened.

59:35Right, right, right. Would you say that to your daughter? Oh my God, no. If your daughter comes to you and says, oh, it's not so bad. Think of all the kids that are being beaten. So that lack of self-compassion is one of the ways that trauma shows up. And that's why I'm saying the healing needs to begin with some compassionate curiosity towards the self. Not why, but why. It's a totally different conversation. And then I can also see and take responsibility and have a lot of compassion for how my volatility emotionally just passed that on to my daughters. Absolutely. And so there are things that happened to them that in the time they didn't feel comfortable coming to me.

1:00:15Yeah, yeah. Because the exact same thing. Exactly. And, you know, of course, it makes me sad that I didn't know this sooner. Yeah. But I feel very grateful for your work because I know it now. And so do our children and so does my husband. And that knowledge gives you the ability to truly address the things that happened and the response that happened in your body. and how that has created these default patterns and this inability to manage stress or emotion or conflict in a way that is healthy and that keeps you connected to yourself instead of constantly abandoning yourself and feeling disappointed in yourself and shaming yourself.

1:01:16And so while I can reflect on that with a lot of sadness and grief and regret, I feel more empowered, honestly. about what's possible. That's the whole point, is that we all want to be free. But as long as we're running on default mode and we're just reacting to stuff, there's no freedom in it. We're actually like puppets on a string. And if you remember Pinocchio, when he becomes a real boy, he says, how silly, how foolish I was when I was a puppet. Well, we're all puppets in that sense. As long as these traumatic impacts are running our lives, we're puppets on a string. And those strings are unconscious.

1:01:53So it's the whole thing about becoming really free. And that real freedom depends on looking at how it was and getting in touch with our capacity to take responsibility now. You know, so what really the work is for all of us is how to become free so it can be in the present moment connected to ourselves. The great trauma psychologist Peter Levine says, no longer living under the tyranny of the past. And it's totally available. It's totally possible. It is totally possible. Yeah. And it's possible for you. It's possible for your children. It's possible for anybody that you know and love. It's possible for your parents if they accept the invitation to look at themselves.

1:02:32If they choose it, yeah. Yes. What is the first step? Is it asking the question, like, why? Like, just being curious with a level of compassion, like, why am I like this? Because if I reflect on your question, that's what happened for me. I started to say to myself, it's no longer tolerable for me to operate like this. I don't want to be this person. I don't want to feel like this. I don't want to feel disconnected from other people. I don't want to have this level of anger inside me. So that's actually the first step, is to recognize one's suffering, rather than taking it for granted. Which, incidentally, is the Buddha's first teaching, is that life is dukkha, like life brings suffering.

1:03:16And then the second question is, okay, why? So it does begin with recognizing the suffering, rather than denying it and running away from it. And there's many ways to run away from our pain through certain behaviors and addictions. And the point is, stop running from your pain. Accept that it's there and be curious about it without blaming yourself for it. So those are the first steps. And then you ask for help. I mean, if help is available, we were born seeking help. You've never met a one-day-old infant that doesn't know to ask for help. But let me ask you a question. how easy it has been going back for you to ask for help.

1:03:59You mean if I think about when I was in fourth grade? Then and even decades later, can you ask for help? Is that a challenge for you? Well, I ask for a lot of help now. No, I don't mean now. I mean before your transformation. Absolutely. Like when you just said that, I had this epiphany that I've always felt like I got to do it myself. Exactly. I've always felt like it's on me. I've always felt like, I'll just take this on. I'll just do this. Which was an adaptation because there was no help available. But... You know what's interesting? Sorry, go ahead. Is you just said there's no help available and I felt this knee-jerk need.

1:04:43Yeah, to protect your parents? Yes. I understand. Because I do know. I mean, I know my mom well enough to know that she would have picked up a shovel and probably clocked the kid into next week. like I yeah yeah that's not what you needed your mother to do you needed your mother to say oh gee that's awful come here let's talk about it you weren't born not knowing how to ask for help you were born with the supreme capacity to ask for help I mean as we know any infant knows how to ask for help so something educates it out of us something compels us to suppress a capacity to seek help so if the first step is recognizing our suffering and the second step is getting curious about it then the third step is I need some help here.

1:05:31It's beautiful. But it's only the simple truth. It is so simple when you lay it out like that. Yeah. And it's also so freeing. Yeah. One of the things that you write about that I think is so important that I would love to have you explain is this idea that we are naturally wired and have a fundamental mental need for joyfulness, playfulness, creativity, and that we sacrifice that. Can you talk more about that? So there's a book written by a palliative care nurse in Australia, and I used to work in palliative care. And it's called The Top Five Regrets of Dying People. And she's talking to people who died before that time, you know, from cancer usually.

1:06:16One of the regrets is that they worked to hard, they didn't play enough. now playfulness is built into our brains all mammals play bear cubs play lion cubs play puppies kittens they all play we're wired for play why because play is essential for a number of things one is essential for brain development it's much more important for brain development than academic learning i'm talking about scientifically you know brain physiologically So play is important. Play is also important to form relationships. Because in play, you can kind of roughhouse a bit, but you're not actually being enemies. So you're making friends that way.

1:06:58So play is essential. Winnie the Pooh, which is one of my all-time favorite books. Why is it one of your all-time favorite books? Well, it's so playful. But at the very end, and I know you're married to Chris Robbins, which is Christopher Robin. Anyway, there's a passage at the end of the book, Winner the Pooh, where Christopher, the boy, by the way, him and his father had a terrible relationship, which is a whole other issue. I'm talking about the real Christopher Robin. But the fictional Christopher Robin is now growing up and he has to go to school, which means he won't be able to play with his animals anymore.

1:07:35And he's trying to explain this to these animals, including Winnie the bear. and the book ends with the statement that I'll paraphrase where it says they go off walking together hand in hand and the book ends with but whatever they do and wherever they go in the enchanted forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing together and that passage as an adult would bring me to tears because as a kid as an infant I wasn't played with my mother was way too terrorized and depressed to play with me and kids peekaboo play starts so early it's essential for mental health it's essential for our brain development so these poor people who were looking back on their lives and saying i wish i had played more play is just essential and i have to say that one of the things that has kept our marriage going 55 years now is that we play so well together and we're just playing all the time when we're not fighting which which by by the way, is long gone.

1:08:35Not long gone, but gone. So play is just essential. And you weren't played with, so did you play with your kids? It's interesting. I have two brothers. They're both intuitively playful with young kids. They just know how to be with them, how to pretend, how to just get into their space. I watch them and I don't know how the hell they do it because I didn't know how to play with my kids. Not really. I kind of faked it, but I always kept waiting for them to develop minds that I could engage with verbally because on that verbal level I'm very comfortable. On the play level I wasn't. I was rather stiff.

1:09:16I wish I was a grandfather. I'm not yet because I learned how to play. I let that infant teach me how to play but no, I didn't know how to play. I didn't know how to play. I really lacked that because it wasn't given to me when I was small. My brothers had it. They grew up under very different circumstances. They didn't have the same parents, you know, the way we talked about it. So they know how to play. I don't. But kids, I mean. Well, a very surprising insight for me as I've been working to resolve issues from my past is noticing that I'm a very warm person, but I'm not affectionate. and it's this epiphany of going in more for the hug being more physical in terms of embracing my kids and it's something that i definitely did not receive and i come from a long line of farmers and hard workers yeah and pull up your you know big girl panties and let's move on and that's the way that my mom is, even though she's warm and amazing and loving, but not physically embracing.

1:10:31And so I really relate to that because it's something as an adult that I recognize that I truly want to change. And it takes effort. It takes effort for me to go, oh, I noticed I'm just standing here. I got to put my arm around. Just count to five. That's true. And then hug somebody. I used to be hug phobic and I embraced you when you walked in yeah you did but honest to god when people in the room would start hugging each other I'd stand there like this and is that a response? it's a response to really not being held and it's also kind of a protective shell I don't want to make myself that vulnerable I don't want to open up what might be some surprising adult behaviors that are an indication of unresolved trauma from your childhood?

1:11:22Well, sometimes it's attributes and behaviors that the world respects you for. So great success can sometimes be an outcome of childhood trauma because you're working so hard to prove something to the world. Like I talked about my own workaholism because I had to prove that it was important. Now that made me a very successful, respected physician from the outside. And the inside, different story. in my family, a different situation altogether. People are very attractive and who put a lot of effort into being very attractive. The world admires them, but it's very often, like I said before, they're trying to attract the attention.

1:12:06That should have been their birthright, and they don't feel good if they're not attractive. And you see this as people age, this desperation to keep looking young because they're not acceptable the way they are. So sometimes it shows up in success and what the world considers success. And other ways? Like you talked about kind of not being the kind of person that is open to hugging or my husband shuts down. Well, my response to a sense of disruption in my relationship with my wife is to shut down. so I just you know go sullen and non-communicative I mean I talk about it in the first chapter of the book this is you know I I arrive home from a speaking trip and she texts me that she hasn't left home yet to pick me up from the airplane and I go into a sullen withdrawal stage because I'm reliving my abandonment unconsciously but I don't realize it and when I saw my mother again after that five or six week separation, I didn't even look at her for several days, which is the typical response of the child because the child's brain says, you were so hurt when you were abandoned that you will not open yourself up again.

1:13:23So your husband is exhibiting the same thing that has been a very dominant problem in my relationship with my marriage, is my tendency to shut down in response to any sense of hurt, even if the hurt has nothing to do with the present moment, but it's a re-triggering of some old wound. You're so amazing. What are your parting words? You know what comes up for me is that beautiful movie with Robin Williams and Matt Damon. Good Will Hunting. Good Will Hunting. Here in Boston. Yeah, that's right. Where the psychologist Robin Williams grabs this very dysfunctional, this regulated client paid by Matt Damon and he says, it's not your fault.

1:14:09If you can only get that, that's the biggest takeaway, I would say. Just get it, it's not your fault, but there's reason for it. It can be worked through. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you. My pleasure. For being here, for sharing all of your wisdom and your research and for not only validating, our experience, but giving us three simple things we can do to reconnect with ourselves and truly take our power back. You're amazing. My pleasure. Thank you. You're welcome. Oh, and I also want to take a moment and thank you. Thank you for choosing to listen to this episode. Thank you for sharing this with people that you love.

1:14:59And thank you for taking everything that you've learned today very seriously and trying these steps that Dr. Mate have given to you because you deserve to reconnect with yourself. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to have a different experience of life. And there is no doubt in my mind that everything that you learned today is going to help you and the people that you love do exactly that. And in case no one else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you, I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a better life and understanding how your childhood has impacted who you've become and taking responsibility for who you want to become next.

1:15:41Everything you learned today is going to help you do that. Alrighty, I'll be waiting for you in the very next episode.

1:15:50I can't believe you're here. I really can't. Okay, get over it. God word that's like, okay, completely screwed up my kids. Didn't mean to.

1:16:06Kids whose mothers were depressed postpartum have a high risk of ADHD. And we can talk about why that's the case. Why is that the case? Because all three of my children have ADHD. Yeah. I still erupt. Well, join the club. And I still need to go to the bathroom. Now that you've said it, my body's like, yeah, I have to pee. Absolutely. You're fantastic. I'm trying not to interrupt you. Sometimes I just go on because these topics are so... I'm so passionate about the stuff. Of course. You're doing fantastic. I used to be an English teacher. You did? Yeah. Oh, I would have probably failed your class.

1:16:40Oh, wow. Okay. I used to be hug phobic. And I embraced you when you walked in. Yeah, you did.

1:16:56Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.