Yeah

... and so on, and that had to do with the loss of those, that confidence owing to early childhood trauma.

And when you're driven to work too hard, you actually ignore what matters, and what matters is, um, what you were telling me last night about how much it matters for you to spend time with your family.

So every summer, you take a num- a bunch of weeks away from your podcast, and you just spend time enjoying your kids and, and y- and your wife and your family, and I didn't do that.

I...

For me, it was very hard to even take holidays.

I always felt I had to keep working.

Not personally.

Twice now, the Canadian government has tried to shut down the clinic through the courts.

Why that should be controversial is hard to say.

It's only because people have this idea that we're coddling and somehow enabling addiction.

We're not.

Addiction is happening anyway.

It's just a question of reducing the harm.

And I would say to those people who argue that way is, if a smoker comes to me with a bronchitis, if I treat them with antibiotics or give them an inhaler, I'm not treating their addiction at all.

I'm suggesting that that's because, in your early experience, nothing but everlasting.

Right.

Trauma is what happens internally as a result of those bad things.

If bad things happen to a child, but they're able to cry about it and express their pain and anxiety, and there's adults there who can hold them and reassure them, that child will not be traumatized.

So the trauma happens precisely when a child has no external receptacle for the expression of the internal experience, so the child then adapts by suppressing their internal experience 'cause it's too overwhelming for them.

It's that self-suppression that leads to the trauma, and that self-suppression happens in an environment when the parents are too traumatized, distressed, depressed, anxious, distracted themselves to fully attend to the child's emotional needs.

So even if the parents are not directly hurting the child, uh, and, and of course I'm not even talking about whether they love the child or not, 'cause virtually all parents love their children.

So I'm not talking about parental love or devotion.

Um, yeah.

Do you think that that sort of deep societal pessimism about a better future underlies some of the maladies that you've been describing? So

if you look at the literature on the physiology of stress, And if you look at the research on what is it that evokes the physiological stress response in people chronically, it's lack of information, uncertainty, loss of control and conflict.

Now, what better four terms describe how the society is functioning these days? Uncertainty, lack of information, lack of genuine information, uncertainty, conflict, loss of control.

So people are being stressed on a massive level.

And that has an effect on their physiology, including on the physiology of their brains.

Because the brain, too, is a social organ.

The brain is shaped by the environment from in utero onwards and is affected throughout a lifetime, physiologically, by the culture and the social conditions under which we live.

But how do you reflect on your own experience and what do you conclude?

be my guest

okay yeah okay if i were to insult you right now if i were to do that What would be your healthy reaction, do you think? Anger, right? Sure.

Healthy anger.

Our brains are wired for it.

And that healthy anger is not a luxury, it's a boundary protection.

Because you'd say, no, you don't talk to me that way.

You protect your boundary, right? The role of emotions in general is to allow in what is healthy and nurturing and sustaining emotions.

Can you explain those two and why the latter makes sense to you?

What is autoimmune disease?

The immune system is meant to protect you against external invasion or internal threat.

So viruses, harmful bacteria, toxins and so on, the immune system is trained to recognize them and to destroy them, to attack them.

So the immune system has been called a floating brain.

It has memory.

It has reactive capacity.

And it has learning capacity.

More from Dr. Maté about the mind and body connection.

The average physician goes into medicine in addition to whatever personal motives that might have, like myself including wanting to make a good living—but also because I wanted to serve humanity and I wanted to help people

peopleBut the system has a way of co-opting everything.

Now, it's not in the interests of an industrialized, mechanized, technologized, uniform uniformity-seeking capitalist industrial system to have people who are spontaneous, who are in touch with their emotions and will not do things they don't want to do, people who know how to think independently.

There's room for that in some narrow areas, but by and large what the system wants...

And I'm not talking about conspiracy here.

Any system is self-organizing.

It'll create the subinstitutions that'll serve its larger ideological and economic interest.

And so what would you say to someone who loves someone that is facing addiction?

As you probably know, for 12 years I worked in North America's most concentrated neighborhood of drug use, which is the downtown east side of Vancouver, British Columbia.

And so I worked with people severely addicted to cocaine, opiates, heroin.

Fentanyl wasn't around then yet.

It is now.

You know, codeine, heroin, Dilaudid, and alcohol, of course, nicotine, everything.

And When you ask me what to say with families, it depends how we understand addiction.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Hmm

... stress, from one perfect- from one perspective, is a physiological s- response of the body to certain conditions.

Now, um, and stress is necessary for life because if I were to threaten you right now or if you're under any kind of threat, your body would have to mount a defensive response.

So you'd have to have stronger muscles, you have to be more alert, uh, blood flow would have to be diverted from your intestines digesting your lunch to your muscles so you could fight back and escape, and that would be facilitated by stress hormones called adrenaline and cortisol from your adrenal gland on top of your kidney.

So in the short term, the stress response helps you survive a challenge or a threat.

The problem is that chronic stress, those same hormones, if they're triggered all the time, um, they actually can deplete the immune system, thin your bones, uh, turn on genes that cause cancer, turn off genes that s- that could take you from cancer, put weight on your belly so you get more heart disease, raise your blood pressure, clogging.

So what we're talking about is acute stress, which is necessary for survival, so you're more alert and, and more, um, responsive, and chronic stress, which is debilitating.

And with these kinds of questions, I'm sure.

Why do you think that is the key demonization here, that it's somehow all Netanyahu's fault? How does that psychologically work?

Well, Netanyahu is a fairly despicable figure, no matter how you look at him.

He's one of the most dishonest, brutal, hypocritical politicians ever to tread the surface of the earth, and that's saying a lot.

But he is not by himself the cause or the source of what's going on.

What's actually going on is the logical and inevitable and foredoomed expression of the Zionist movement, which from the very beginning has dehumanized the Palestinians and has always arrogated to itself the right to displace and oppress and dismiss and kill as many as possible or as necessary of a Palestinian population.

So Netanyahu is nothing new.

He seems to be the most egregious expression of the Zionist dynamic, but that has been there all along.

And actually, is it cross-generational? Is it epigenetic? Explain what the politicization of empathy, how it's involved in these NATO-nation wars.

Now,

why? Now, as a matter of fact, to mental health challenges.

For example, healthy anger, we're wired for healthy anger.

for a number of emotions, including love, caring, lust, playfulness, curiosity, seeking, fear, panic.

We're wired for these as survival mechanisms.

We're also wired for anger.

So it's not like anger is a strange phenomenon.

And

So, to start with normal, can you expound a bit upon the societal conditions that we have begun to accept as normal?

There's an interesting word that has come into currency fairly recently, which is to normalize something.

Well, what has to be normalized? Something that in the first place wasn't normal to start with.

And in the modern world, so many things have become normalized.

In other words, assumed to be natural and inevitable and perhaps even healthy, but actually are inimical to human health and human development.

to human joy, to human advancement.

And these normalized concepts and structures very much provide the scaffolding of our current society, of our current culture.

Can you unwind your definition of disease?

Right.

Now, why is that? Number of reasons.

Number one, we live in a society that is materialistic, whose view of human beings is basically materialistic, whose view of human beings is that what we're really after is material goods, and the more we produce and the more we consume, the happier we are.

Furthermore, the intention of the economy is to make a profit.

Now, no matter how you do it.

So it doesn't matter what kind of poisonous product you sell people.

If you make a profit, you're a genius.

Mm-hmm.

Let me ask Dr. Gabor About your own journey to this particular historical moment, and then how you connected with Dr. Jaber, and how it connects with your work.

Sure.

Thank you.

My first relationship with Palestine was as a Zionist.

In my late teens, I joined the Zionist youth movement and the return, which is historically a myth, but the return of the Jewish people to Palestine served as an antidote to the antisemitism that my family had experienced, that I had experienced in Eastern Europe.

And some years later, I-- it was brought to my attention that there was another people there.

It wasn't just a question of a return.

Mm.

Great

GreatSo the book is called Scattered Minds and, um, it's the world's-- it's in the top three best-selling books in the world on ADHD.

I wrote it in 1999, but science has since then only confirmed what I said then.

But there was plenty of science then already.

So I was diagnosed in my 50s, and, um, the, the medical mantra was that this is a genetically determined, uh, disease of the brain, and I never bought that.

Intuitively, it didn't made no, made no sense to me.

Um, the tuning out, the absentmindedness is not a disease.

Yeah

So at what point does peer orientation really become a problem?

Well, first of all, let's look at humans from the evolutionary point of view.

Um, for millions of years there have been human beings on Earth.

Um, for 200,000 years, our own species has been on Earth For all those millions of years, and for most of those two hundred thousand years, kids grew up in a whole network of adult attachments.

It's not that they didn't have friends, but the friends weren't the primary relationship.

The primary relationship was with the adults, with the uncles, the aunts, the parents, the whole community.

And, um, this has been subverted in modern culture.

So based on that research, what would you advise parents then? Should we be telling them to hang out with their friends less?

Yeah

... he's right about one thing, the fact that ...

And by the way, I've never said that I'm a survivor.

I've always said I was an infant survivor, but that does not make me an expert on the Middle East.

And the fact that I'm a infant survivor of the, the Nazi genocide does not give me any ... uh, does not make me an authority on Israeli politics or Palestinian-Israeli issues.

There are no authorities.

There are points of view, and there's ideologies and there's way of understanding, but- You know, if, if there's lots of Holocaust survivors who totally support what Israel does and plenty who don't, but neither can claim that their survivorship gives them authority.

Mm

The

food companies, I'm not making this up, they do research.

They hire the best scientists, including neuroscientists, to figure out what combination of sugar, salt, and fat will most likely hook into the addiction-prone circuits in your brain.

Literally, they're pushing.

And what's sugar doing to our system? The epidemic of obesity.

In the UK, more and more kids are obese.

Diabetes is becoming a huge problem.

Traumatized.

So with that understanding, Gabor, how would you start working with someone, say someone in the grip of some terrible opioid addiction on the streets? Where, where do you begin then?

Well, I would ask them exactly what I asked you, and, and I'd say, "Your impulse to escape suffering is completely unders- completely understandable.

It's very human.

There's nothing wrong with you fundamentally.

Your addiction is an attempt to resolve the problem of pain.

Can we talk about the pain and where it came from, and can we find you other ways of dealing with it so that you don't have to destroy yourself in order to escape from your pain?" It's a very different approach from saying, "You got this brain disease, and we just have to treat the disease." Now, the brain is involved in addiction, of course.

But if you look at the parts of the brain that are involved in addiction, they're actually parts of the brain that have to do with love, with, um, a sense of belonging, a sense of connection, and a sense of pain relief, and a sense of vitality.

[laughs]

but can you talk about what that process looks like? Where does someone go with this?

Well, let me talk about one aspect that we didn't talk about in Hold On To Your Kids, which is, as I said just a moment ago, women have always carried the role of being the stress absorbers of their families, including their husbands.

So in my marriage, I was a very needy little boy when I was thirty or forty or fifty or sixty years old, you know? Who becomes the mother? The women automatically take on that mothering role towards their spouses, which means that if I have two children, then the mother has now three babies to look after, the two little ones and the big baby who's thirty or forty.

And women automatically very often take this on.

That's immensely stressful.

So first of all, look at your marriage and ask yourself, "How much mothering am I..." I'm not talking about genuine spouse-to-spouse support, which is meant to be reciprocal, and that's of course why we connect.

But how much one way emotional supporting and parenting am I'm doing to my spouse? 'Cause everything I do that way is taken away from my children.

Yeah.

So-

Now, people say, "How can you compare this to the a- heroin addiction of your benighted HIV-ridden patients?" And, you know, it's a fair question.

The differences are obvious though.

It's the similarities that are, uh, that are interesting.

So my definition of addiction is any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences.

Any behavior.

So that, that could have to do with drugs obviously, and often does, alcohol, nicotine, heroin, crystal meth, whatever.

Why do you think the word addict is, uh, is used at all?

Hmm.

So the point is...

That's the second point.

The next point is that no infant has impulse regulation and no infant has attention, and there are no genes for attention as such or impulse regulation as such.

They have to develop.

Now, if we're talking about...

And, and they say that ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition.

Yeah.

Is that also true for ADHD in the sense that while I personally don't have an ADHD diagnosis, I am definitely prone to being distractible, and so would you say the same thing is true, that there's a range, a continuum of attentional faculties and attentional faculty challenges, and that the same thing is true, that it also, those challenges have their root in childhood?

Yes.

So I have an ADHD diagnosis.

I was diagnosed in my early fifties.

That's when I wrote my first book, Scattered Minds, which I wrote it twenty-six years ago, but even a few months ago, it was a New York Times bestseller.

ADHD is another one of these conditions which medical ideology says is an inherited disease.

No, it isn't.

Can you walk us through what those are?

I didn't know that.

Yeah, I know.

A lot of people don't.

It was coined by a-another fellow Hungarian of mine, um, called János Selye, S-E-L-Y-E, who was a physician and researcher who came to Canada in, uh, early 20th century, just after the First World War, and he did his research on stress at University of Montreal in Montreal.

And he's the one that showed in the laboratory the impact of stress on, uh, diminishing the immune system, overgrowing the adrenal gland, which is the stress gland, and ulcerating the intestines.

And he's the one that...

The stress-- The word stress wasn't new, but the way he used it was new.

How do I know if I'm healed enough to not pass on that trauma?

I didn't know that.

Yeah, I know.

A lot of people don't.

It was coined by a-another fellow Hungarian of mine, um, called János Sorhan Selye, S-E-L-Y-E, who was a physician and researcher who came to Canada in, uh, early 20th century, just after the First World War, and he did his research on stress at University of Montreal in Montreal.

And he's the one that showed in the laboratory the impact of stress on, uh, diminishing the immune system, overgrowing the adrenal gland, which is the stress gland, and ulcerating the intestines.

And he's the one that...

The stress-- the word stress wasn't new, but the way he used it was new.

How do I know if I'm healed enough to not pass on that trauma?