Dr Gabor Maté | Authenticity Can Heal Trauma (Part 2)

foreign [Music] [Music] to you I think you say at some point that all trauma is pre-verbal and a trauma is something that you you're quite careful in the book to say look it doesn't mean that you were you were run over or you were kidnapped that it's things like not being fed as a small child and not being responded to yeah yes um and you then take that idea of trauma being something that can happen to a very young child and you say before our minds can make the world that you know we make the

world that we then live in he says but before that happens the world makes our mind yes and it's those early experiences for you are those the things then that you could classify as traumas that they they become embedded in the child and manifest them later in life for something how does that happen how does it get does it get embedded yeah well first of all what sort of things are they and then why do they get invested drama basically means a wound so traum is when you're wounded and that one persists and and has

impact in your life later on so tomorrow this is important to distinguish trauma is not what happens to you tell us what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you so I I just came back from Budapest I was there for representing this book on Hungarian and uh this is I don't know who designs this but I once you know one of the things that I have to do every day is Slim you don't want to talk to me if I haven't swung you know and I swam this morning already it's okay

[Music] so in Budapest I was staying in a hotel and around the corner there's a swim club where I go swimming every morning across the street directly across the street as far from us as say the second row here is the building where my mother and I lived when I was 11 months old and I nearly died there and she gave me to a stranger in the street on the same paving stones that are still there and so I didn't see her for five or six weeks a lot of people know the story the trauma

wasn't that she gave me to a stranger the trauma is what I made it mean that any child what can the child make it mean except that I'm being abandoned and who gets abandoned somebody who's not lovable somebody who's not wanted so the trauma then is my sense of not being wanted and not being lovable [Music] not being considered important enough and not that trauma plays itself out in for decades afterwards so it's not what happened to me as such because when you look at it objectively what happened to me as such was that my

mother gave me to a stranger and the stranger took me those are both huge acts of Love Actually that's the universe loving this child to take care of it but that doesn't matter it's how what I make it mean so the wound is then what happens within us that gets embedded in a nervous system as me as emotional memory not as recollection I don't recall being given to a stranger about my mother because the parts of the brain that recall aren't even online at that age yet it doesn't come online until years later but the

emotional memory of being hurt and being abandoned and not being wanted that's embedded in the nervous system and then it then it gets triggered whenever anything even vaguely resembling it later on decades later shows up in fact if you look at the expression being triggered it's a really interesting expression but these days we're you know trigger warning you know don't you triggered me well here's the thing what can be triggered for the trigger to do anything it took is a very small little thing for a trigger to have any impact whatsoever there has to be

an ammunition there it has to be explosive charge so when I get triggered it's not because somebody did something it's because what they did happen to set up the explosive charge the emotional baggage that I'm carrying so if I carry the emotional baggage of somebody who doesn't have a sense of being wanted and being important anything later on that reminds me of that will trigger me and drive my behavior so that's how the throne works it's embedded in the nervous system in the brain in a form of emotional subverbal memory Nothing by the way I'm

sorry to say one more thing it's also better than the body so many of you will have had the experience or if you're a body worker like a massage therapist inside you go to massage therapists they touch you in a certain part of the body and all of a sudden you're overwhelmed by emotion we've had that experience so that's the body as vessel says vessels under cloak the body keeps the score so the term is embedded also in the in the muscles and in the connective tissues and the nerves you also in the book you

make the point that this word trauma it's difficult to hear it in any way other than negative but the point that you make in the book is that these the thing the story you tell yourself or that your body takes in is meant to help you at the time and is that why it gets it that it gets retained that in its original form it's doing something positive it's later becomes that's a good point tell us more about that please absolutely so um let's take somebody with a diagnosis of Personality Disorder you know borderline personal

disorder one of these diagnoses that don't explain anything they might describe something but they don't just they don't explain anything you know so one of the characteristics is that they don't trust people it's just hard for them to form relationships and they're very easily feel a hurt in a relationship well that's a perfectly normal defensive response to a childhood when you were hurt a lot you shouldn't trust I mean why would you want to trust how could you trust if you were always having a sense of being disappointed and even being betrayed so that what's

called to be a pathological manifestation actually begins as a coping mechanism and it's associated with your survival or um depression you know this disease of depression well really what does it mean to depress something it means to push it down no look it's pushed on in depression his emotions but why would somebody push down their emotions only because it was dangerous for them to express it or unacceptable for them to express it in other words they listen to a lot of parenting experts who tell people to tram you know to to to suppress children's emotions

if if the emotions aren't acceptable to the fans then a child in order to survive will suppress their emotions will depress them that's a survival technique associated with being accepted and then being part of the family which is something the child cannot do without so once you associate something with survival you're going to keep doing it especially since it's unconscious it's not like you chose to do it it's just that you know this is how your organisms survived by depressing your emotions now you're going to keep doing that in fact you'd be afraid not to

later on you're diagnosed with this disease but it begins as a coping mechanism and there's so many others of these coffee mechanisms that are associated with survival and therefore we don't give them up because if we if something if our survival depends on being a certain way if that's what we learned we're not going to give it up that easily especially as you point out children have very few options yeah the the ones that are built into us as mammals it's fight flight or freeze well if you're if you're a baby you can't fight yeah

and you Fade to run away so it doesn't leave you with much does it except as you say just to freeze and yeah and it's that need for attachment this is a word that you deal with a lot tell us about attachment so this is a conflict uh it's probably Central to my work um in in all manner of conditions and and also in all kinds of situations it's a very powerful dynamic in adult relationships for example is the the child um has an absolute need to belong to the parents and to be cared for

by the parents that drive to be close to somebody in order to be taken care of or to take care of the other for that matter is called attachment and mammals are creatures of attachment they can't survive without attachment without the caring relationship obviously Leon cannot survive so attachment that's fine but then we have this other need that um that's also determined by Evolution which is I call authenticity and just out all the self-authenticity being in touch with ourselves being in touch with their feelings and our bodies and our emotions um I know last time

I spoke here I think I asked the same question but let me do it again um I think I did if you've had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something and ignoring it and then being sorry afterwards just raise your hand okay what you're telling me here is about your childhood because gut feelings are essential for survival we evolved artery in nature for millions of years the human audience the humanoid ancestors of our species lived out their nature as did our own species live out in nature for most of our existence as

a species like out of the 150 200 000 years that homo sapiens has walked the Earth if that can be represented in one hour then until about five minutes ago we lived out there in nature how long does any creature in nature survive if they're not in touch with their gut feelings so that being in touch with our bodies and and our emotions is essential also terrific but what happens is if for the sake of fitting with the family or with the culture that doesn't particularly support our authenticity we have to give up our connection

to ourselves our authenticity for the sake of attachment then being inauthentic being out of touch with ourselves is how we survive we're afraid to be ourselves because we associate being ourselves with a threat of being rejected and so this means that for the rest of our lives we're going to be in relationships where we're Faith to be ourselves to really say what it feels like for us now that has terrific implications when I say terrific I mean significant implications a study I quote in the book they followed 2 000 women over 10 years over a

10-year period those women are unhappily married and didn't Express their feelings we're four times as likely to die as those women are unhappy married but they did talk about their things so so that inauthenticity which is not a moral not a moral Judgment of my part it's a something people do in order to survive the childhoods but that exacts a major cost in terms of physical and mental health not to mention your relationships um where you're afraid to be yourself where you're in a relationship and you don't even you're they don't even your partner doesn't

even know you because you're afraid to be yourself so you feel alone even when you're partnered because if you're not known you're going to feel alone it doesn't matter how many people surround you so you know the the price that we pay for an authenticity is huge and yet so many of us survived our childhood and when you put your hand up I mean have you ever met a one day old baby that wasn't in touch with that gut feeling oh I'm tired and I'm hungry and I'm uncomfortable and I'm wet but Mom and Dad

are working so hard I better not cry I better not cry you know come on you know in other words when you put your hand up something happened between the day you were born and a few years later when you no longer listen to your gut feelings because you couldn't afford to something happened one of the things which come across very strongly especially in the early part of the book is that we tend to think that children learn things when we teach them when they get to school or when we can have a conversation with

them and very strongly in the book what comes across is that children become who they are and learn their first their first moral language as it were before any of that in other words if you think to yourself I shall wait until the child can speak and then I'll teach them it's too late they've already learned everything from what you did or didn't do yeah that's right so the the the um and as a parent because I was quite out of touch with myself and based on my own history I was never comfortable playing playing

with kids I kept thinking well once they learn language because I'm good at words you see so I thought once they learn language they're not able to but I missed the whole point is that the real development happens before words even come along the the emotional part of the brain the the holistic you might say more feminine although it's not gender determined at all holistic emotional part of the brain the right side of the brain both in terms of the evolution of the species but also in terms of the development of the individual the right

side of the brain the emotional brain develops first and it's the template for everything if we get the rights out of the brain right the left brain will follow very nicely if we don't get the right side of the brain if we don't establish the emotional relationships which children require for healthy development then they might become very intellectually developed on the left brain side but they'll be very underdeveloped there won't be a proper template for it and then they're going to be professors and all that kind of stuff you know or philosophers I don't know

or medical doctors for them so that in this culture the um the left brain really rules but the left brain um divorced from a healthy emotional underpinning where does it get us it gets us to where we are which is we're the only species but the only species that creates environments that are destructive to its own species that's what we look that's what the left brain has gone as because the right brain is underdeveloped and they and they can't speak you can't in some way you don't have verbal access to the lessons that first language

you learned before by the time you were six months old so how does that part of us to us when we won't listen it speaks to us through our um see here's the thing that's here's the other thing we think that we have this one brain up here and what's a brain a brain interprets stimuli from the environment processes them and responds that's that's what a brain does so yeah we have the cerebrum up here but there's also it turns out there's a brain connected to the heart there's a nervous system that surrounds the heart

which is in communication with this brain here and of course the gut has been called the second brain the gut is more some more neurochemicals than the brain does in some ways and gut feelings are not um luxuries as we've demonstrated they're actually a form of knowledge so the gut is processing stimuli from the environment when these three brains are in sync with each other then you have true wisdom then you have through awareness when this one is unmoored from the other two you can have all kinds of logic and all kinds of Science and

all kinds of Technology but you're not going to have wisdom