This is an excellent interview that one of my sons told me about and sent to me. I've since gotten Gabor Maté's latest book, which I also highly recommend, along with another one — Lost Connections by Johann Hari — that I also first heard of thanks so my son.
I hope that you will watch and share this video or share this post. There is so much wisdom here. And growing potential for awareness, healing, and transformation within us and our culture and beyond.
My family has been impacted by intergenerational and cultural trauma, addictions and anxiety, depression and disconnection. Whether we are aware of it or not, this is also true for the vast majority of us — to one degree or another, we are all impacted by the toxic culture we live in.
Connecting dots, seeking truth and support, embracing how I've carried unresolved trauma and grief, and transforming obstacles embedded in the protective walls I long ago built around my heart has empowered me to embody an increasing and ever growing depth of consciousness and connection, compassion and kindness, truth and wisdom and love that was once inaccessible to me.
Deepest bow of gratitude to all the courageous teachers and healers, wisdom-keepers and truth-tellers, visionaries and loving souls who help make possible our individual and collective awakening from the trance of separation. We are all connected, all related, all family.
In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, just out, called “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” “The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people,” says Maté, who argues in his book that “psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease.” He says healing requires a reconnection between the mind and the body, which can be achieved through cultivating a sense of community, meaning, belonging and purpose. Maté also discusses how the healthcare system has harmfully promoted the “mechanization of birth,” how the lack of social services for parents has led to “a massive abandonment of infants,” and how capitalism has fueled addiction and the rise of youth suicide rates.
Excerpts from the transcript:
Today we spend the hour with Dr. Gabor Maté, the acclaimed Canadian physician and author. He’s just out with a new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Maté has worked for decades in Vancouver as a family physician, palliative care director, addiction clinician and observer of human health. Dr. Maté’s work has long focused on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. Over the years, he’s written a number of best-selling books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Every human being has a true, genuine, authentic self. And the trauma is the disconnection from it, and the healing is the reconnection with it.
Why do we get disconnected? Because it’s too painful to be ourselves...
So, trauma is not the bad things that happen to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.
People are much more lonely and isolated than they used to be. Literally, it causes inflammation in the body and suppresses the immune system...
RUSSELL BRAND: Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. They were two traumatized people fighting to govern a traumatized world.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly what I’m saying. And these are the people that our society rewards with power.
Our schools are full of kids with learning difficulties, mental health issues, that are trauma-based. But the average teacher never gives a single lecture on trauma.
We need trauma-informed medical care, trauma-informed education. If we had a trauma-informed society, we would have a society that looks much more compassionate...
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah, I just want people to see the truth. Solutions arise out of people when they confront themselves with the truth, when they’re not afraid of the truth.
TIM McCARTHY: I think the biggest thing that this whole healing journey has taught me is how to be human....
AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for the film The Wisdom of Trauma, featuring Dr. Gabor Maté, who is our guest for the hour. He’s just written a new book with his son Daniel titled The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Maté will be appearing tonight in New York City at the 92nd Street Y. On Thursday, Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh and I spoke to Gabor Maté. I began by asking him about the pandemic and the book title, The Myth of Normal.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: So, the pandemic actually revealed to us how toxic our idea of normal has been, because it showed us the desperate need for human connection that we all have. But this is in a culture that has been isolating and atomizing individuals for a long time, where loneliness has been an epidemic for decades. It showed the noxious effect of racism and inequality, because the people who had the greatest risk for being affected by COVID were those of a lower social class and of people of color.
The normal that we came from, in my perspective, was already a toxic normal. We don’t want to go back to it, because my contention in this book is what we consider to be normal in this society is actually neither natural or healthy, and, in fact, it’s a cause of much human pathology, mental and physical. And actually, people’s pathologies, what we call abnormalities, whether it’s mental or physical illness, are actually normal responses to what is an abnormal culture.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Gabor Maté, you say in the book, in fact, that there are no clear lines between normal and abnormal. Could you explain what you mean by that and how you understand the spectrum along which these things lie?
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the key here is trauma. Trauma is a psychological wound that people sustain. And I’m saying that in this society, most of us, because of the nature of the culture, the way we raise children, the way we have to relate to each other, the very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people, so that it’s false to say that some people are normal and others are abnormal. In fact, we’re all on a spectrum of woundedness, which has great impact on how we relate to each other and on our health....
DR. GABOR MATÉ: It’s [trauma] a wound to the psyche, to our emotional being and to the soul. And trauma is not what happens to us. People, when they think of trauma, they think usually of catastrophic events, like a tsunami or a war or parents dying or sexual or physical, emotional abuse of a child. These events are traumatic, but they’re not the trauma. The trauma is the psychic wound that we sustain. And our psychological traumas have lifelong impacts. And in my medical work, I found that psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease, whether autoimmune illness or cancer, or the various mental health conditions.
And in our society, psychological woundedness is very prevalent, and it’s rather an illusion to believe some people are traumatized and others are not. I think there’s a spectrum of trauma that crosses all layers and all segments of society. Naturally, it falls heavier on certain sections — on people of color, people with genders that are not fully accepted by society, people of economic inequality who suffer more from inequality — but the traumatization is pretty general in our culture....
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, as your question implies, trauma can be induced in people in a number of ways. It could be a single dramatic event — the death of a parent, a tremendous loss in life, a terrible explosion. You know, it occurs that way sometimes. And those are relatively easy to identify, and then, actually, they’re easier to deal with.
But for a lot of people, it’s much more insidious and much more chronic than that. For example, certain child-rearing practices. For decades, Dr. Spock, who was kind of the guru of parenting, advised parents not to give in to the infant’s tyranny, the infant’s resistance to sleep. Now, what he calls the infant’s tyranny is the infant’s desperate need to be picked up and held by the parent. That’s just a trait that we share with all other mammals. You tell a mother baboon not to pick up their baby, or a mother cat not to respond to their child’s distress. But here in North America, we’ve been telling parents for decades to ignore their children’s cries, or, for example, when a child is angry, a 2-year-old is angry, to give them a timeout, which is to say, to threaten them with the loss of the attachment relationship that they desperately need. Those events are just as traumatic over the long term, but they’re harder to identify because they seem so normal and they don’t seem dramatic. But they do show up later on in life in all kinds of dysfunctional patterns...
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Maté, you speak in the book about unresolved traumas. So, in the examples that you’re giving now, or indeed in the case of trauma more generally, if one can speak generally about trauma, what kinds of practices can lead, if at all, to the resolution of a trauma?
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, whether we’re speaking about on a social level, which we have to speak, or whether on the individual level, which is what it strikes most of us, the first thing that has to happen is a recognition that how we’re living or some aspect of our lives is not working for us, and that there’s a cause for it, which we can actually uncover by some compassionate inquiry.
And very often there needs to be a wake-up call. Now, COVID could have been a wake-up call for this culture, but I don’t think it will have worked that way. It should have, but it didn’t, because of the nature of this society to transformation. The resistance to social transformation in this culture is so deep that the COVID lessons, I don’t think, have been learned, nor will be applied. On the individual level, very often it’s an illness, whether of a depression, an anxiety, a psychiatic diagnosis, a relationship breakup or a physical illness, like an autoimmune disease or malignancy, that works as the wake-up call. So there’s got to be some kind of event that happens that says to us, “Mmm, this is not working.” We need to understand why not and need to move past it.
And once we get that wake-up call, in whatever form — and one of my intentions in this book is to help people not get to that dire, dramatic point where some significant illness has to wake them up. But once we get to the point of waking up, then we come to look to inquiry. OK, what was driving my behaviors? Why was I always driving myself on the job like as if my life depended on it? Why was I a workaholic, stressing myself? Why was I so hard on my children? What is it that makes me feel so hurt when my partner doesn’t pick me up at the airport? You know, so, then we start looking at what happened to our lives, and we find the answers in our history.
And then it’s a matter of letting go of those patterns. And that takes some kind of work, usually therapy or some kind of spiritual work or psychological work, some kind of different way of taking care of ourselves. Usually it takes some inquiry, what I call a compassionate inquiry, of looking at ourselves with real curiosity: What is causing me to live the way I’m living? And why is it not working for me?...
To continue this transcript, and for the original Democracy Now! link, please go here: https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/16/myth_normal_gabor_mate_trauma_mental
For more information on The Myth of Normal, please go here: https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/
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