Dr Gabor Maté | Don’t Ignore Your Own Needs (Part 3)

[Music] [Music] it's worth saying though isn't it that when someone that it's possible to be a very good and loving person um when you're not even being authentic to yourself I'm thinking of there was um someone who's you quote in the book I think a patient or someone that you knew who their family referred to them as they were lovely they were wonderful they they just fitted in with everyone all the time they blended into the background and they were so loving and supporting yeah so they were a genuinely lovely person but at enormous cost

to themselves how does that happen what kind of person is that well I'm reminded of um the TV series The crown and um Queen Elizabeth's father the late Queen Elizabeth's father um whose nickname was B Bertie was one of these people that was the Queen the Queen mom says about him after he died that he was just a perfect son he never thought of himself at all you know and um very loving very nurturing to everybody else but himself and those are the people that get cancer by the way very often and um [Music] so

the love that you described David flows towards others but love is supposed to be a two-day Val two-way valve supposed to flow in both directions when it only flows towards others and you ignore your own needs then you then you're taking on way too much stress in this life and it's going to tell on your health so that's wrong with loving others we're meant to do that but when we're loving others by chronically suppressing our own needs where we are always afraid of disappointing others where um our own needs are compulsively ignored that's a quick

route to disease and it is that connection with disease which shines through the book a lot I particularly as you said that there's a personality type the type that's always helping someone else particularly in women has a high rate of cancer but then you also talk about um that self I think you call it self abating um is associated with an enormous number of autoimmune diseases which as you point out in the book The Rise in autoimmune diseases um arthritis and diabetes cannot be explained genetically or by any other means really yeah um how is

it in your view that a physical disease which modern medicine would say we'll just cure that with a pill can flow from these early lessons in childhood sure so when you mentioned my autoimmune disease and women 7 80% of autoimmune disease happens to to women which is an incredible proportion and if you look at something like multiple sclerosis um the gender ratio back in 30s was about 1:1 but not as not it's more than three women for every man and you can't explain it as you say genetically cuz genes don't change in the population over

80 years and so something's going on here now it so happens that here's where you have to understand the Mind Body Unity like again this is one of those well-kept scientific Secrets I mean scientifically there's no doubt in fact it's beyond doubt that mind and body are inseparable that that that the emotional apparatus in the brain and the immune system and the hormonal system and the nervous system are not even separate systems that are connected they're one unit different manifestations of the same unit so let's take something like um anger um you mentioned a child

who's who can't escape or fight back but as an adult um if I were to intrude on your space in a hostile or threatening way at some point you'd want to get angry with with me my space get out that's healthy anger so healthy anger is a boundary defense it just keeps you from being invaded and being intruded upon we have circuit in our brain for anger anger is not the bad thing all animals have a circuitry all mammals have anger circuitry in their brain why because it helps them defend their territories you're in my

space get out it's healthy in fact it prevents conflict cuz if I mount a anger display we might not come to blows so anger is the boundary defense right so what is the role of the immune system it's a boundary defense the immune system keeps out that which is unhealthy and and and toxic and bacteria and so on and allows in nutrients and vitamins and whatever you healthy bacteria whatever isn't good for health so both the immune system and the emotional system have the same R you see to let in what is nurturing and to

keep out what is toxic that's the RO of the emotional system that's the RO of the immune system given that they're the same unit they're not separate when something happens emotionally it's going to impact on emotion on immune system as well so the people just suppress themselves uh emotionally because they're programmed to do so not because it's their fault but because that's how they survived the childhoods those people that suppress their emotions uh uh then naturally it's going to have an impact on the immune on the immune system and it does so the immune system

will either fail to protect you or it'll actually just like anger that you repress turns against you in the form of uh self-loathing and self-criticism and shame in the same way the immune system can turn against you now you got autoimmune disease and if you look at it from the cultural point of view which group in this Society is culture a cultural related to take on other people's stresses to swallow their own needs to not to express them not to be angry um to take on responsibility for looking after their partners and their families it's

women that that's one of the patriarchal determinations of the female role in this society and wonder then that women are much more prone to autoimmune disease and I can tell you it was here in uh London in 19 2018 that I gave a talk at a conference saying some of these same ideas and there's a young woman there with a disease called lupus lupus is an autoimmune disease which attacks multiple organs in the body um in her case amongst other manifestations it showed up in this butterfly rash on her face and her fingers were white

as chalk because the circulation was impaired and and and and she came came to the stock and she got it she's all her life has been pursuing attachment over authenticity always denying her own needs of course she was told because in see Physicians don't understand any of this they don't know what I'm talking about um as a profession I mean only because they're not taught the science isn't so my knock on my profession isn't that there's too much science there's not enough science there's a huge SCE of science that we just don't ignore that we

ignore so her name is Valentina this woman I'm I'm I'm I'm I have Liberty to talk talk about her she was told that you got this autoimmune disease we don't know what causes it there's nothing we can do about it we can give you strong medications to control it for the rest of your life four years later she's off medications her color is as normal as it gets and she's functioning beautifully and I know many such examples because she changed her emotional relationship to herself she stopped ignoring her own needs and serving the needs of

others automatically her physiology responded now I'm not offering a magic cure here but I know so many such cases and of course that's what I would expect if I if I understand that the mind and body are one then if I change not if I develop better thoughts but if I actually work through my trauma and change my emotional relationship to myself so I show up in the world differently of course I can expect that to have an impact on my my physiology and in so many cases it does so these aren't purely theoretical considerations

I'm talking about people's actual Health here M and it does give you a very different view of what disease is as you say in the book disease isn't necessarily an invasion of your life from something outside but it at least a significant part of it is a manifestation of something that's in you and because it's in you you can do something about it that's the whole point David so and language is very important how we talk about things so when we say I have cancer or I have ADHD or I have depression or I have

Ru to arthritis there's an assumption in that way of talking it's not it's very normal to talk about it in those terms but there's an assumption there the assumption is that there is this thing there's an entity called the disease then there's another entity me and this entity me has this other entity so I have this glass the glass has got nothing to do with me is not part of me it's not a manifestation of who I am it's simply an object that I have I can use it put it down Give It Away shatter

it that's not going to change me in any way at all but what if disease is not an entity that is a life of its own what if disease you know like when you go to a doctor and you got this disease here's the prognosis that assumes that the life is disease of its own which is totally independent of your life it's a thing that you you have it's an entity that some entered you and now you have it but what if it's not an entity what if it's a process what if it's a process

that manifests your life what if it's a process that manifests how you were carried in your mother's womb what happened to you as a child what beliefs you developed about yourself what if it reflects your relationships with the world with your community with your family with your culture and above all what if it manifests your relationship to yourself that it's a process that manifests all these Dynamics it then follows that if you change that relationship to yourself you can have an impact on that process that the disease represents and that's what I believe is actually

going on it's a process it's not a thing it doesn't have a life of its own necessarily um I'm not saying everything is curable it's just not that simple but it is a process and in so far as you change what goes into that process you can have significant influence on that process in many many many cases and you can certainly prevent it from coming on by understanding this for