What's The #1 Way To Recover From Addiction? | Dr. Gabor Maté

there's been more Progressive thinking with recovery and addiction and more medical advances but yet I feel like things are getting worse and worse every single year the numbers go up and up and up like why do you think that things are so bad right now despite like some of the advances that we've had well really happy to show you actually I got this yesterday first just have depress the the methal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture we live in a toxic culture so that if you imagine a laboratory petri dish in which you're

growing organisms in a brew we call that culturing a culture broth by the way that's the technical term if a large number of organisms can not brew we dying off or getting sick you'd call that a toxic culture so well on the one hand we're making advances in treatment the social conditions keep hurting people really badly my contention is is that live in a culture so out of sync with human needs and which is so traumatizing to so many people on so many different levels and it's so stressful for people that diseases and addictions and

mental health conditions are burgeoning by the way if you look at the numbers of the people dying of overdoses or or the number of kids who are trying to kill themselves or the number of people being diagnosed with depression and anxiety the number of women being diagnosed with autoimmune disease these numbers keep going up and up and up if you see them as just individual pathology based on genetics we have no explanation because genes don't change in 10 years or 20 years or 100 years so if these numbers are going up it's because there's something

going on in the environment what's going on in the environment is our culture is getting increasingly stressful so it doesn't matter what advances you're making in treatment as long as the conditions that Brew illness physical and mental and addictions are continuing to worsen you're going to get more and more people getting sick and that's what's going on but in addition to that I have to to say that specifically when it comes to addiction or more broadly speaking medical illnesses in general our advances are technical but they're not advances in wisdom so that most Physicians still

don't understand trauma in fact most Physicians don't even get a single lecture on trauma in their training which is unbelievable and many addiction programs are still not trauma informed they they're they're focused towards getting ready of the behavior which itself is a useful goal but unless you deal with the underlying dynamics that drive the behavior you can expect relapsed in large numbers so we live in a society that's not trauma informed we have a legal system an educational system medical system that's ignorant about trauma and we have social conditions that breed trauma on every level

that's why things are getting worse yeah it's really well said because it's I feel like sometimes in the addiction community it's like people just like all right just get sober get to recovery put the Band-Aid on I think obviously like getting sober is a great first step getting into recovery is an awesome step yeah but I think people have been sold this idea that once you get sober into recovery that all of a sudden life gets easy and it just doesn't life gets it gets so much harder because now you don't have that coping mechanism

that you have been suppressing things for for so long and I know one of the keys to recovering from addiction recovering from trauma recovering from some mental health issues is kind of having the goal to bring your yourself back hole which you talk about in your book The Myth of normal and maybe I want to give some people some hope and that they can if they're listening to this you know improve their lives and recover from trauma and recover from addiction so what steps can somebody take to reestablish some wholeness in their life to help

them heal first of all you said when people get sober I make a distinction even abstinence and sobriety people become abstinent but that doesn't become doesn't mean they become sober like abstinence is good it means you're not using something to temporarily escape from yourself that's good you're not getting drunk you're not getting stoned that's good but that's not the same with sobriety sobriety is a real capacity of conscious presence so you can become abstinent without being consciously present that's the first point the second point is as you and I have been agreeing in this convers

ation the addictions are always a form of coping of Escape as you just said when all of a sudden you stop using the addiction it doesn't mean that all the problems you've been trying to escape have gone away you've just taken away a powerful coping mechanism for a good reason because that same cop mechanism was creating more problems for you that's true but all that pain all that turmoil that lack of inner peace that you're experiencing before you become addicted are still going to be there in fact because you're absent now you're you're going to

really feel them in a way that maybe youve never been felt before so now you have to work your way through that to their traumatic source so it's actually with abstinence that the work actually begins towards sobriety towards conscious awareness so that's the journey now recovery interesting word I used to be for a few years an English teacher so I pay a lot of attention to language so what does it mean to recover something get back right exactly now what is it that people get back when they recover their lives yeah they get back themselves

right and you ask for some good news here's the good news if what get they back get back is themselves it means that the true authentic selves was never destroyed you lost contact with it as a result of trauma but because it can be never be destroyed we can regain that contact so that capacity to reconnect to ourselves to our true cells to truly recover ourselves that's with us as as long as we're alive and conscious so I'm totally optimistic about human capacity for healing by the way healing the word itself means wholeness which means

that we become whole all these parts of ourselves that we cut off because of trauma we can reconnect with our healthy anger we can reconnect with our love with our joy with our sense of meaning and purpose we can reconnect with our genuine commitment to be in contact with others all these things are available to us so trauma doesn't destroy anything it cuts us off from things that never themselves go away and Recovery is the reclaiming of our whole two selves available to us always always always and that's the basis of my absolute optimism that's

going to give some people some hope because I think a lot of times people feel like one of the biggest problems I personally didn't go to AA or Na and one of my biggest problems with it is that everybody has to identify themselves as an addict or an alcoholic where I personally think that do I think that maybe some people just they're further down the the addiction Spectrum than others I think sure but I think there's a lot of people most people that maybe just situationally they got addicted to something or maybe they used it

as a coping strategy or maybe they had obviously we talked about trauma and the role that that plays or their environment I mean just stressful situation at a job and and then they end up identifying themselves as this addict and they're told that they're going to be like this the rest of their lives and they just begin to say okay like what's the point of even trying to get better what's the point of even trying to improve my life I'm going to be an addict the rest of my life this is my destiny I couldn't

agree with you more so I've been to 12ep group sometimes I've had my addictive issues and there's a value I mean I have to confess that what I'm about to say you know party I'm going to completely agree with what you just said but proba I'm going to push back a bit when somebody stands up in front of a group them says I'm so and so and I'm an alcoholic it's a brave step they're saying I'm going to stand up in the front of grp of my fellow human beings and acknowledge that I'm engaging in

a behavior that's been harmful to myself and to others I'm going to stand up in front of you despite whatever shame I feel about it because I want you to know me and I want you to support me and I'm not going to deny it anymore but that's a positive step in itself however there's a danger in it and the danger in it is exactly what you just outlined which is that you completely identify with a certain Behavior you say I'm an addict no you're not an addict that's not who you are you're a warm-hearted

loving human being who used the certain addiction as a coping mechanism that's who you are but you're much more than that behavior so that whenever somebody identifies themselves that this is what I am I'm GNA say no no that's not who you are so if I could possibly Outlaw the word addict I would what if somebody every time you use the word addict instead of addict you'd have to say so and so or myself is or am a human being who suffered so much pain that they use this particular Behavior or substance to suit themselves

for a while what if that's what you had to say every time you wanted to use the word addict now you have a much more complete picture of a human being so I agree with you and don't identify with some behavior that you had to adopt as a coping mechanism but that doesn't characterize who you really are there's a danger in that identification so it's it's a limitation of Who You Are and who you ever were so on the one hand I see the value in that kind of acknowledgement but I also see the danger

of identifying with that acknowledgement actually I agree with you on both those things I I guess I was more trying to emphasize like the latter of what you said about just long-term identifying with that I mean trust I have a lot of friends in the 12ep community I've been to meetings myself and I do think they are valuable I do think they are beneficial but I do think it's flawed in some way as well and I think there's a lot of benefit to reducing the shame and stigma and just owning who you are in that

moment and getting in front of a group of people and creating and forming new relationships with those people to recover from addiction mental health trauma and that sort of thing what's the path back to wholeness I know you you said like coming back to ourselves There's Hope for that and we can do that like I know you outline like I think it's 4 A's in your book The Myth of normal to help people become whole like what are those 4 a and how can they be used to PE for people to feel like themselves again

well the four ways that I list are pretty arbitrary I could have mentioned more you know but they include healthy anger because a lot of people grew up in circumstances when they ruined allowed to experience healthy anger and healthy anger is not a bad thing it's a good thing it's a boundary defense if you don't know like you say you were bullied in school part of your problem when you were bullied was that you didn't have hard of be in touch with with your Healthy anger and the bully can always sense that because the healthy

anger is just a boundary defense says no you're in my space get out a lot of kids are socialized out of their healthy anger because of parenting practices that we talked about so healthy anger is just as no really important it's not the same as rage it doesn't have to be aggressive it's a boundary defense so that's an important a is the capacity to set boundaries people who develop autoimmune disease usually have no capacity for healthy anger or at least their capacity for healthy anger has been suppressed as the anger that they suppressed turns against

them so does the immune system that's why there so much aimmune disease amongst women by the way within the society they're told that the woman's anger is unacceptable I'm not talking about rage I'm talking about healthy anger so that's the first a another a is agency the sense of that we are in charge of Our Lives that we're the ones to make the decisions so that even if I go to a doctor with a health issue ultimately I'm I'm the one that's going to decide what path is right for me I'll take the advice respectfully

but it's up to me and the same thing is true in everyday life who's in charge of your life who's living your life authenticity that you and I have already talked about that's one another one of the A's so these various Concepts that we adopt them they can help us sleep I didn't put this into the book but awareness is an important day of mindful awareness because so much of our functioning to speak for myself but most people I know is is unconscious so to be aware of our minds and what arises in our minds

is just an important Dynamic so there's lots of Pathways to Healing I never say that the ones that I outline is the only one I think the biggest thing is curiosity towards oneself the willingness to ask questions the willingness to let go of ideas that no longer serve us the commitment to be authentic the willingness to learn from negative experience or disease can be a great teacher addiction can be a great teacher I mean let me ask you this when you consider what you've learned from coping with your addictions and overcoming them aren't you grateful

for the learning that you've be able to acquire of course I wouldn't trade it for anything so the addiction was your greatest teacher wasn't it yeah why do we have to go through such painful experiences though to get these lessons I just wish that I mean obviously I'm grateful I wish there was otherwise you know the I in a book I quote his Greek playright escalus 25 200 years ago he said that the way the master or God created us we have to suffer suffer into truth and let's face it suffering is a big wakeup

call now I don't recommend that people should suffer to wake up I'm trying to make people conscious before the suffering happens but you know when suffering does come along it can be can use it as a teacher not just as an enemy to get rid of what is this trying to teach me now so keeping that mind of curios City open I think is so essential