Trauma And Healing In A Toxic Culture With Dr. Gabor Maté

Renowned speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté on trauma and healing in a toxic culture. What are the consequences of surrendering authenticity for the sake of attachment? What are children’s irreducible needs, how early childhood trauma can show up in our parenting, the impact of parental stress on kids, including stress in utero how you can deal with your own discomfort with our child’s big feelings & pathways to healing. Impactful, moving and inspiring!

Transcript

I am Anna Siwold and this is Authentic Parenting,

A podcast about personal development in the context of parenting where I explore how you can find more calm connection and join parenting through the process of self-discovery and inner growth with the trauma-informed lens.

I'm a parent educator and my mission is to help children by helping parents.

The motto of this podcast is raising our children,

Growing ourselves.

Today,

Trauma and healing in a toxic culture.

My special guest for this episode is renowned speaker and bestselling author,

Dr.

Gabor Mate.

He is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics,

Including addiction,

Stress and childhood development.

Dr.

Mate has written several bestselling books,

Including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts Close Encounters with Addiction.

When the Body Says No,

Exploring the Stress Disease Connection and Scattered,

How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It and has co-authored a parenting book with Dr.

Gordon Neufeld called Hold On to Your Kids,

Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers.

His works have been published internationally in nearly 30 languages.

His new book is out.

It's called The Myth of Normal,

Trauma,

Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

It's phenomenal,

Groundbreaking,

Riveting and beautifully written.

A true masterpiece.

I am adding it to my best books I've read in 2022 list.

You can find my list in the show notes and see the other titles I included.

I think he's one of the great thinkers of our time on the topics that he's an expert in.

He's wise,

Deep and compassionate.

He was featured in a documentary called The Wisdom of Trauma,

Which if you haven't seen,

I highly recommend.

I organized a community movie screening for the authentic parenting community back in May,

And we held a post movie live discussion,

Which was fantastic.

If you have missed that opportunity,

You can still watch the film on your own.

It's available online.

I'll have a link in the show notes for your convenience.

I enjoyed this conversation immensely,

And some of the key points we talked about are children's irreducible needs,

Attachment and authenticity,

How early childhood trauma can show up in our parenting,

The impact of parental stress on kids,

Including stress in utero,

How you can deal with your own discomfort with your children's big feelings,

Pathways to healing and so much more.

I also asked him what advice he would give to himself as a new parent.

It was a tremendous honor to have him on the show.

I had seen him live in New York City in 2017.

In fact,

I kept my ticket to that event as a souvenir,

And I use it as a bookmark.

He is my hero,

And I feel truly blessed and grateful for having had this opportunity with him.

Please enjoy this eye-opening,

Insightful and inspiring conversation with the one and only Dr.

Gabor Maté.

Gabor,

Welcome to the podcast.

This is such a deep honor for me,

Tremendous honor,

Especially today is the release of your new book,

The Myth of Normal.

And I am getting to spend some time with you and celebrate this.

So this is amazing.

Well,

This is the first podcast I'm doing on this day of the book release.

It's special for me as well.

Oh my gosh,

How do you feel about this book coming out?

You worked so hard on this book.

What does it mean to you?

It's a tremendous book.

I finished it,

And it's deeper,

Wider,

Greater,

All of your work combined in this big Bible.

I think it's incredible.

Well,

Thank you.

Well,

Today it's a bit of an anti-climax actually,

Because I've been working on this book for 10 years and gathering material and then two and a half years of really difficult writing.

And now it's here and the anticipation has more of an edge to it than the actual reality.

So I'm very pleased about it.

It's the book I wanted to write.

I didn't know how I'd get there,

But I got there with the help of my brilliant son Daniel,

Who helped me write the book.

At the moment,

It's rather subdued how I'm feeling.

I think it'll change,

But that's what's happening at the moment.

What is your intention for our conversation?

I want to ask you that first,

Because this is a parenting podcast and you do write beautifully about development,

Children's needs.

I do have my own interest and agenda,

But I would love to ask you,

Do you have a special message or an intention?

Do you want to impart something to the audience today that I may not even ask?

I don't know.

Well,

Fundamentally it's that we do have parenting instincts,

Contrary to what some people think.

There's an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago that there's no mothering instinct.

Well,

Tell a mother baboon that there's no mother instinct,

Or tell a mother cat that there's no mothering instinct.

But what it is true is that in our society,

That instinct gets stifled,

That instinct gets denatured.

And so that if there's one message is that we have to find a way back to our natural parenting instincts by creating environments that support those instincts,

Because instincts are there,

But they're not automatic.

They have to be evoked by the environment.

So the child has a certain nature.

We as parents have a certain nature.

For a reason,

The subtitle says trauma,

Illness,

And healing in a toxic culture,

Because I believe that in this culture,

Our natural instincts are actually stifled and subverted and even turns against us.

So if I have a message,

Let's find out what we need to do to get back to who we actually are as human beings.

Yeah,

Hence the authenticity.

I want to ask you about children's needs.

I think you speak so eloquently about that.

I think it would be a good place to start.

What are children's basic fundamental emotional needs?

Yes.

So the needs of any species develop in response to their evolution in a certain environment.

So you might say that every species has certain expectations,

Or you might even say that every species is a certain expectation,

Or every organism.

Like look at our lungs.

Our lungs don't expect oxygen.

They are an expectation for oxygen.

They would not have developed,

Evolved without oxygen.

Now human beings would not have evolved without certain emotional conditions being there.

We couldn't have.

So when we talk about children's needs,

It's not an abstract question.

It's the question of what is our evolutionary expectation over millions and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution?

What expectations does a human child enter the world with?

And that's true of any species.

Now for humans,

The expectation is more complex because we're more complex beings with consciousness.

But in terms of the infant's expectations,

The infant of any species,

Birds,

Mammals,

Are an expectation for a nurturing,

Supportive,

Protective environment,

Physically and emotionally,

By the way.

Now what are the emotional needs?

Now the physical needs of the human infant are obvious.

They are to have nutrition and shelter and protection.

That's obvious.

But we also have emotional needs that are essential for development,

Which is to say,

And this is what I call irreducible needs,

Needs that if they are not met,

We don't develop optimally.

So what are the irreducible needs of the infant?

And as I list them,

I will just mention that these are those who needs of the human child are exactly the conditions that hunter-gatherer groups,

How we've all provided to their children.

So these emotional needs are,

Number one,

A strong attachment relationship,

Secure attachment relationship with the adult caregivers.

Attachment meaning the drive to be close to somebody to be taken care of or to take care of the other.

So strong attachment relationship,

A secure attachment relationship.

Secondly,

What brilliant psychologist friend of mine Gordon Neufeld calls rest.

Rest means that the child doesn't have to work to make their relationship work.

The child doesn't have to meet the parent's emotional needs.

The child doesn't have to be good,

Smart,

Pretty,

Successful,

Compliant.

The child can do nothing to make the relationship better,

And the child can do nothing to make the relationship worse because the relationship is completely unconditional.

So there's no work involved on the part of the child.

Now,

As I'm listing these needs,

I'm also noting that in our society,

They are not met for most children most of the time.

The third need is the freedom and the capacity to experience all our emotions,

Whatever they happen to be.

Now,

Our brains are programmed,

It's certainly emotional circuits.

We have a circuit for caring for love.

We're born with it.

So are other mammals.

We're born with the circuitry for play.

Play is an essential aspect of human development.

Play is an essential aspect of mammalian development.

All mammals play,

And it promotes brain development.

We have circuitry for panic and grief,

Which is what happens when our attachment needs are not met.

We have circuitry for anger.

Now,

Healthy development demands our freedom to experience all our emotions when they arise spontaneously.

In our culture,

We can talk about this.

There's a lot of pending advice that actually pushes parents towards not accepting a child's feelings,

In fact,

Rejecting them,

Punishing them.

So that's the third need,

Is the capacity to feel all our emotions,

Whether it's rage,

Anger,

Grief.

The fourth one is free spontaneous play out in nature with play myths of different ages.

Now,

Free spontaneous play doesn't mean holding a cell phone and playing video games.

It means creative,

Imaginative play where nothing is required.

There's no winning.

There's no losing.

There's no purpose to the play other than interaction.

These play actually helps to form our social communication and social engagement circuits.

So these are the four essential needs.

And again,

They mirror what human evolution used to provide,

And they also mirror what our society does not.

I love the word spontaneously when you said emotions,

When they arise spontaneously,

Because that's so big.

A lot of parents that I work with,

They always say,

Oh,

My parents didn't allow me to feel all of my feelings.

I'm trying to raise my children differently,

And I want them to feel all of their feelings.

And that's great,

I say.

So how does it play out in real life?

What I hear later from their description is even though they have that desire,

They don't know how to allow those feelings to come to surface.

They don't allow the expression.

They want to stifle the expression.

But that's the biggest part of feeling the feeling,

The expression,

Right?

As a matter of fact,

If your child,

He has a challenge and a dilemma,

And I talk about this in the book quite extensively.

The child has this need to attach,

To belong to the parent.

I mean,

The child just doesn't need to do that.

No child can survive without that.

And something in the child knows that I can't survive without the attachment relationship with the parent.

But then the child also has this need to experience all their feelings,

Which is what I call authenticity.

So we have this need for authenticity and for attachment.

Authenticity from the word auto,

For self.

We have to be able to be ourselves.

Now,

Why is that important?

We evolved out there in nature.

Just how long does any creature in nature survive if they're not in touch with their gut feelings?

Yeah.

Not very long.

Okay.

Now we have the modern dilemma.

I just need to express my,

To feel my emotions,

Which means as an infant and as a young child to express them because children don't stifle themselves.

I mean,

Have you ever met a one-day-old baby who says,

Well,

I'm feeling really upset,

But I'm going to keep it quiet.

You know,

I don't want to bother mommy and daddy.

So that's just natural,

But what happens when mommy and daddy can't stand the child's anger?

So they give the child a timeout.

If you're hungry,

You're going to have to sit by yourself,

Which is the advice that a lot of parent best-selling books tell parents.

An anger trial should be made to sit by themselves.

No,

What message does the child get?

I can have my attachment with my parents,

Or I can have my authenticity,

But I can't have both.

Because if I'm authentic,

I can't have the attachment because they're going to banish me or punish me.

Therefore,

The child represses to maintain the attachment relationship,

Which is primary.

They're going to repress their emotions.

They're going to push them down.

Now what's another word for pushing down,

Man?

When I push something,

What am I doing?

Depressing.

Depressing it.

15 years later,

They're going to be diagnosed with the so-called disease of depression.

It's not a disease.

It's an adaptation to having to belong to a family where they were not accepted for their anger.

The repression of authentic emotion,

As I point out in other sections of the book,

Is a major template for autoimmune disease,

For mental health conditions,

And for malignancy.

That may sound strange to people who don't understand the science of mind-body unity,

Which includes most of my colleagues,

My fellow physicians,

But the science is totally clear that the mind and body can't be separated when you push them hunting,

When you push them emotions,

You're affecting the immune system as well.

So the consequences of surrendering authenticity for the sake of attachment are deep,

And they become a pattern that you pursue all your life,

Which means that you enter relationships later where you don't assert your own needs for the sake of belonging to the relationship.

So the implications are many,

Many,

Many.

These are not trivial questions.

The problem is parents are actually advised to suppress their child's emotions,

Which is toxic,

Which is actually traumatic for the child.

Now,

How do you allow a child's feelings?

It's very simple.

You allow them.

You can't help but frustrate your child.

If you're a good parent,

You're going to frustrate your child because a two-year-old wants a cookie before dinner.

Are you going to give that kid the cookie before dinner?

You're not.

My 14-year-old wants an apple watch.

Okay,

He wants an apple watch.

Immature creatures confuse their needs with their wants.

So when they want something,

They think they need it.

So that two-year-old thinks,

I need this cookie before dinner.

So you're not going to give it to them.

Now,

What do human beings do when you frustrate their desires?

They throw tantrums.

Believe me,

As a 78 years old,

I can tell you that's still the case.

So a two-year-old throws a tantrum.

Then their parent says,

Time out.

You can't be with us.

No,

The answer is,

Oh,

You're really angry with mommy or daddy.

Come here.

You really wanted that cookie,

Didn't you?

What a disappointment.

You know,

You validate the child feelings.

You hold the child.

The feeling goes.

So that when children allow their emotions and sort of held empathetically,

They learn that I can go through this emotion and it'll pass and I'll be okay.

This is how they learn self-regulation.

Otherwise they just learn self-suppression,

Which,

As I already said,

Becomes a lifelong threat to health.

Yeah.

They disconnect from themselves.

Right.

And it is through our emotions.

We feel who we are,

How different we are from other people.

I think that's so fundamental.

As I get older and older,

That's what I understand.

It has been my goal in the recent years to feel and express my authentic,

Spontaneous feelings whenever I feel them.

Even if I feel,

I'm in the post office,

A song comes up and I remember something said,

I allow myself to cry.

Or if I'm on a podcast,

It's been so liberating to live my life like that.

But because most of my life I was,

I didn't live like that.

I was suppressed.

I was embarrassed.

People make comments,

Right?

You're so sensitive.

What's there to cry about?

The parents,

Relatives care.

Everybody's uncomfortable.

But,

You know,

As I get close to my 50,

I say to myself,

You know,

This is the time.

I have to live my life the way I want to live and feel my feelings.

Let me answer something.

When do you feel more alive?

When I feel more alive?

When you're suppressing yourself or when you're.

.

.

Oh no,

No.

Of course,

When I'm expressing and feeling them,

I feel more alive.

That's the life energy.

That's the life force.

There may be some people in your life who can't stand that.

No,

You have a decision to make.

They're not going to choose attachment or authenticity because as a child,

The choice is not a choice at all.

It's an automatic.

As an adult,

We can make a choice,

But it doesn't mean that some relationships might not survive.

Well,

That's a decision others will and others will become more deeper and more meaningful and more intimate and more satisfying,

But some may not.

And so throughout life,

We have to keep asking ourselves,

Do I choose authenticity or attachment?

And what are the benefits one way or the other?

And what am I afraid of one way or the other?

Because this society demands conformity.

And so very often,

Just to feel that I belong to my own culture,

I have to suppress who I am.

Well,

That's a tragic dilemma for a lot of people.

Point is,

We prepare kids for that dilemma by how we relate to them as children,

Whether we meet their needs or whether we don't.

Yeah.

What can you say about the parents' own discomfort with the child's quote unquote,

Difficult feelings?

I think most of the time that's the problem,

Right?

Because our needs were not met.

We were not allowed to express our spontaneous,

Authentic feelings.

And now as a parent,

It's not hard for me.

This was not hard for me,

But I see it's harder for a lot of parents.

They want to shut that down.

They withdraw from their.

.

.

There's numerous ways parents respond.

So what can you say about that?

How can that parent develop that comfort level to allow the child to be with their feelings?

Well,

Allow me to give a personal example.

But the answer to how to develop that comfort level is to examine the discomfort.

So it's not a question of let's work to make ourselves comfortable.

It's what is the discomfort all about?

And the whole book is about helping people to examine themselves compassionately,

Curiously.

This example is not from the book,

But when my eldest son with whom I wrote the book,

Daniel,

Was one year old,

He had diarrhea.

I remember him on the kitchen floor,

Sitting on his little blanket,

And a little bit of wet poop comes out of him.

And I started crying.

And I just felt so tragic.

And my wife says,

What's this about?

It's just a little kid having a bit of diarrhea.

When I was a year old,

I had dysentery.

It was one time Budapest,

We were Jews under the Nazis.

I was really ill with dysentery,

Which involved diarrhea.

That's the memory that came back.

Now,

That's not a conscious memory,

Because I don't recall that time.

But my body held that memory.

When I see it in my son,

Or at least I see a faint shadow of it in my son,

That sense of doom comes up.

But that's a dramatic example.

But it's,

But it generalizes.

When you as a parent feel uncomfortable with the child's emotions,

You are talking about your own discomfort,

That for some reason was created when you were a child.

And there may be something else going on as well,

Which is that in the child's discomfort or anger,

You made sense that you somehow failed as a parent.

And you can't stand that idea.

So you want to stifle it in the child.

I mean,

I'm talking about myself here.

So both that some trauma,

Some unresolved emotion on your part is being triggered by the child and or that somehow you see this as wrong.

And if the child is wrong,

Then you're wrong as a parent.

And then you have failure.

So you really have to examine the source of your discomfort rather than how do I become comfortable?

You can't force yourself to become comfortable.

But if you recognize compassionately the source of discomfort inside yourself,

That'll resolve the issue.

Wow.

So great.

This reminds me of my own experience.

My daughter was four years old.

She enjoyed bath time.

She didn't want to come out of the tub,

Right?

She's playing and enjoying.

And in one day I find myself enraged and triggered severely the steam,

The bathroom,

The closed environment.

And of course,

Like I want to almost attack my kid because she's not listening to me.

It's time to get out of the bath.

And I completely found myself swept by this overwhelming emotion.

And I didn't do anything to my child,

But I went out and I started hitting myself because the emotion was so big.

Years later,

You know,

I thought about that a lot after that.

And then years later I connected that.

After the earthquake,

They shipped us to a different country to live with far relatives.

The first night that we arrived,

We were dirty,

You know,

We were homeless for a while and they wanted us to get clean and shower and that kind of stuff.

There was an outside bathroom.

They were rich people.

They had,

You know,

A lot of facilities.

One of the bathroom was a guest house.

I guess it was outside.

They put me there because I was the older kid among my cousins.

They thought I could go in there and shower by myself.

That was the assumption.

But remember,

I'm a traumatized kid after the earthquake.

I don't have my mom.

And I didn't know anything how this shower operates.

It was this gas system and there is the heat and I can't control the water temperature.

The steam is coming and I'm in that bathroom naked screaming,

Help,

Help,

Help.

And no one is coming.

So years later,

Here I am,

You know,

In my thirties in the bathroom where my four-year-old doesn't listen to me,

That memory comes up and I feel so helpless and powerless that I want to escape that.

And you know,

It's so powerful,

This stuff.

Like you said,

It doesn't have to be so traumatic,

But yeah,

But when you shared that with your son,

That came to me,

This story.

Well,

Trauma is not what happens to us.

I mean,

That's one of the themes that I cover,

By the way.

Are you okay?

Yeah,

I'm okay.

I'm okay.

But it's overwhelming for me to be sitting here speaking with you and sharing and face a lot of emotions for me for this interview.

You know,

I'm really deeply honored and overjoyed and anxious.

Yesterday there was a thunderstorm and I'm like,

What if the electricity goes off and I can't do this interview?

I was so anxious.

Brian,

Are you anxious right now?

No,

I'm not anxious right now.

No.

Yeah,

No,

I'm not anxious.

But there's a lot of emotions still in me.

All right.

Well,

Thanks for being here with all your emotions.

So what I was saying is that trauma is not what happens to us.

Trauma is what happens inside us,

Is the result of what happens to us.

So trauma is not the external event.

Trauma is the wound.

In fact,

Trauma means wound.

So trauma is the wound,

As we explained in the first chapter.

So trauma is the wound that we sustain no matter what happens.

Now,

The more sensitive you are,

The more easily wounded you are.

So that externally the same event can happen to two people.

One may be traumatized,

The other will not be,

Depending on how sensitive they are.

Sensitivity is simply one of the things that is genetic about us.

Significantly is our degree of sensitivity.

So when we're more sensitive,

We're wounded more easily.

So people say,

What's the big deal?

You know,

Nothing happened.

They have no idea what happened because they're not living in your nervous system.

And sensitive children particularly,

If they're given the right environment,

They're that much more playful,

Creative,

Joyful,

Spontaneous,

Intuitive,

Spiritual,

Artistic.

But those same sensitive kids,

When they experience difficulty,

Where there's no support,

They experience pain,

They're hurt that much more.

So let's understand that trauma is not the external event.

Trauma is the wound that the child sustains,

No matter what the external event.

And you can traumatize people in two ways.

One is by doing bad things to them,

Which happens around the world a lot.

A lot of children have terrible things happen because of family violence,

Family trauma,

Or because of war,

Racism,

And poverty.

But a lot of other kids are hurt,

Not because bad things happen to them,

But because the good things that should have happened didn't.

In other words,

Their needs were not met.

So you may look at a child's life,

And think,

Terrible happened.

They're still traumatized.

Not because anything terrible happened,

But because their needs were not met.

And that's a wound as well.

Yeah.

And people like that always say,

Oh,

I had a great childhood.

There was no trauma in wildlife.

Yeah.

That they feel that disconnect from,

They're unable to see,

I guess,

Because of their pain.

Well,

When somebody tells me,

I've had that conversation a hundred or maybe a thousand times all over the world.

And we talk about it in the book,

Actually,

This myth of the happy childhood.

And when people say to me,

I had a happy childhood,

Well,

If they have an addiction,

If they have a medical,

Chronic medical condition,

If they have a mental health condition,

For me,

It's a given that they were traumatized.

If they hadn't been traumatized,

They will not be having those conditions.

It's that simple,

Actually.

So they all know,

But I have been an addict,

But I had a happy childhood.

Or yes,

I have rheumatoid arthritis,

But I had a happy childhood.

Then I issue what I call the happy childhood challenge.

I said,

Give me four minutes,

Three or four minutes.

And it never takes longer than that because it's not that their happy memories are not accurate,

But they don't remember the pain.

How could they?

You know,

They suppressed it.

It was so painful,

Right?

You have to detach from it.

Yeah,

That's the whole point.

And they detach at the moment.

Not only that,

People are really terrified of blaming their parents.

I mean,

There's some people who hate their parents,

But a lot of people are terrified of blaming their parents.

Because as a child,

It's very painful to have anger for the parent.

So they suppress their anger.

Now,

Children don't know that it's possible to love somebody and be angry at them at the same time.

Children don't have that integrative thinking,

Right?

Yes,

I'm here on the one hand,

But on the other hand.

So in the absence of that integrative capacity,

Children will suppress their pain and their anger so as they can feel the love for the parent.

So they feel disloyal if they talk about their childhoods in anything but positive terms.

But if you look at most childhoods,

And I'm not talking about parents who deliberately hurt their parents,

I'm talking about parents who love their kids and are devoted to them and do their best,

But their best is limited by what trauma they carry.

And their best is also limited by the stresses that what I call this toxic culture imposes in the parenting environment.

Yeah.

And when the parent only.

.

.

I had someone who said recently,

Oh,

When my child is happy,

Or they want their child to be always happy,

That's when they accept and dish out love,

Right?

This conditional love they have for their children.

A lot of people have a hard time.

When child is behaving poorly,

They withdraw the love.

When they use love as this token of negotiation to control the behavior.

But when we don't accept the child fully,

Only accept part of the child when the child is happy,

What's the message?

We don't accept the whole of you,

Right?

We only accept you when you're happy,

When you don't give us trouble and our life is easy.

Excuse me.

As a medical doctor,

I can't tell you how many very ill adults I looked after,

Both with physical and mental illness,

Who grew up with always this happy face child.

Because here's the thing about life.

Life brings pain.

Not because we deliberately impose pain on our children,

But because life brings pain.

A friend doesn't want to play with you.

Your dog gets hit by a car,

Grandpa dies,

Or grandma doesn't feel like seeing you a certain day,

Or daddy's upset,

Or something.

Pain comes into life.

That's the nature of life.

Happiness is not a state that anybody can constantly maintain.

And by the way,

There's a huge difference between matters,

Which is contentment and happiness.

Happiness basically says,

This is pleasurable,

I want more.

Contentment says,

I have enough and I'm good.

Contentment doesn't mean that I'm always happy.

Contentment also means that I can be with my pain when it arises.

Yeah.

I think we rub our children off of those experiences when we try to fix,

Make things perfect and magical and for them not to feel the pain of.

.

.

I had a client once who called me,

Said,

Oh,

My daughter is in school and her pet fish died.

She said,

What would you recommend?

Shall I go to the pet store because I have time and replace that fish?

Or what's going to happen?

And we explored that.

What will happen?

Well,

That's life.

That's an experience,

Right?

Your child's pet fish died.

Let her come home and cry about it,

Be with that reality.

We have,

As I said earlier,

We have a circuit in our brain for grief.

Grief is all there to come to terms with loss and life brings loss.

Oh,

You're telling me?

I had so much loss.

Some of it is like to subvert the child's natural grief.

I mean,

Whether or not you get another fish later on is fine,

But not immediately jump in there to rob the child of their actual experience.

Yeah.

Oh,

My gosh.

It's so valuable.

I think that's the biggest.

.

.

If we failed,

Quote unquote,

As parents to provide anything else,

If we can just provide that aspect of parenting,

Right,

To help our children be with their discomfort,

Uncomfortable feelings and us as supportive,

Empathetic human beings,

Just holding space for them.

Oh,

My gosh.

People would be so much better off.

We can change the world.

There would be world peace even in the world.

Yes.

Right.

Yesterday,

I was walking.

I live in Princeton.

Princeton University campus is very near.

I was walking on campus and I was thinking about this interview and it was so interesting.

An acorn fell off the tree right in front of me.

I picked it up.

And you do talk about the acorn.

I thought that this was fortuitous.

I'm going to ask you about the acorn.

Can you talk about that metaphor?

It's so beautiful.

Sure.

So we talk about human development.

So much of parenting culture in our society is about how do I get my kids to do that or to do this,

To achieve this,

To attain that?

That's one question we're asking.

The other question I'm asking is what are the parents' needs?

So there's best-selling books based on what's comfortable for the parent.

There's a book called Parenting by the.

.

.

What's it called?

By Emily Oster.

I forget the name.

Is it Parenting by the Numbers?

Anyway.

Crip Shit.

Crip Shit.

Oh,

My gosh.

Terrible book.

It's all about.

.

.

It's a god-awful parenting book.

And it's all about how to make the parents not feel guilty for not meeting the child's needs,

Which in this society is very difficult.

So I appreciate the intention.

But nobody's asking is what are the child's needs and what are the actual needs of the mother,

Not to fit into this society,

But to parent naturally.

She talks about being with her screaming infant in a hot sweltering closet at her brother's wedding trying to breastfeed while the infant is screaming.

Well,

No wonder the infant is screaming in a hot sweltering closet.

Why is she in the closet?

Why isn't she in the middle of a crowd breastfeeding her baby,

Which is what hunter-gatherers do?

That's just the craziness of our culture.

But we're not asking what the child's needs are.

So an acorn,

To come back to your question,

It's in the nature of the acorn to work to be a mighty oak tree.

That's its nature.

That's its evolution-determined nature.

But if you put that acorn on my desk,

It'll never become an oak tree.

It needs certain conditions.

Same with human beings.

It's in our nature to be self-regulated,

Socially connected creatures with mastery as we approach our environment.

In other words,

We know how to orient ourselves and how to get along with our environment and how to make that work for us,

How to get along with others,

How to respect ourselves.

That's in our nature.

But our nature will not unfold any more than the oak tree or acorn will if the conditions for healthy development are not met.

And those conditions,

By the way,

Begin in the womb.

Because as we explained in the prenatal chapter,

Already the mother emotional states during pregnancy can either have a negative or a positive impact on a child's brain development based on how stressed or how supportive the mother is.

And then it continues with birth.

What kind of birth are we having?

Is it mechanized and interfered with and intimidating?

Or does it allow the natural love cocktail,

The hormones that are naturally released in the moms and the babies,

Circulation to prepare them from that bonding experience?

And then what kind of support does the mom have after birth?

Because we used to.

.

.

You know what happens when an elephant is born,

I love this story.

When the mother elephant goes into labor,

All the mother elephants stand in a circle around her.

And as the infant plops on the ground,

They all reach out with their trunks and they stroke the infant.

That's elephants.

Human beings are meant to parent communally.

So no wonder so many people are struggling.

And Emily Oster,

Best of soul,

Is trying to somehow make people more comfortable with the impossible.

She's trying to square the circle.

My point is,

Let's get back to the circle.

Circle,

I don't mean become hunter-gatherers again,

But let's recognize what we've lost and let's compensate for it.

So we have developmental needs.

If you want to be a mighty oak tree,

You've got to start right at conception and all throughout development,

Which also brings in the educational system.

Because the human brain develops from inside the womb until adulthood,

Which means the main job of the schools is not to teach what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they instituted a certain article or what year the Battle of Gettysburg took place.

That's not the main job of the schools.

The main job of the schools is to promote healthy brain development.

If the child has healthy brain development,

We have a natural brain circuit for what's called seeking,

Which is curiosity.

We have to have that.

No creature develops without curiosity.

You have to explore your environment.

All you have to do is to promote the development of that curiosity circuit.

Children will want to learn about the Battle of Gettysburg.

They'll want to know about what happened in history.

They'll want to understand science and math and so on.

So the main job of schools is not the delivery of a curriculum,

But to promote healthy brain development to children who naturally want to acquire the curriculum.

Well,

Teachers don't get educated in that.

Teachers don't learn about brain development.

Doctors don't learn about brain development.

Doctors don't learn about trauma,

The healthy conditions that are necessary for child development.

So what's the result?

We have the numbers of kids that are being diagnosed with anxiety and ADHD and depression is going up all the time.

The number of kids who are trying to kill themselves or who do is going up all the time.

The number of kids who are medicated is going up all the time.

There's an article in the New York Times two weeks ago,

Front page article in the Sunday Times,

This child,

A teenager.

Yeah,

It was 10 plus medications.

She was that the one?

Ten different psychiatric medications to a teenager.

Probably if you understood what's needed,

They will never be on one,

Nevermind 10.

But 10?

It's a completely bankrupt culture in terms of understanding human development.

It's worse than bankrupt.

So that's the balance that is one of the intentions of this book is to help people understand what's needed for healthy development and how can we store the conditions within ourselves,

But also socially that are needed for our healthy unfolding as human creatures.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yesterday I just learned something too.

Somebody contacted me and said,

You know,

This teenage boy committed suicide.

Parents were the last one to know that he was struggling with certain things.

Parents are the last ones to know that their child is struggling.

That's totally typical in this culture.

In fact,

That's the reason the kid committed suicide.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's so absurd.

It's hard to say this because parents are going to feel blamed.

No,

They did their best,

But in this culture,

The toxic culture,

The healthy attachment in parents and children is undermined from an early age on for reasons that I've talked about in previous books,

In my book on ADHD,

My book on,

Which is called Scattered or Scattered Minds,

Depending on which version you're in or the book Hold On To Your Kids.

But in this culture,

Kids get cut off from parents,

Which means that what happens in a peer culture becomes far too important to them.

And if they're bullied or disked or rejected by their peers,

They're devastated because they don't have the security of adult attachments.

A child who's securely attached to parents,

If they get rejected by other kids,

Will go home and cry about it or be upset about it to their parents,

But they will not be despondent about it.

So typically in a suicide case,

The parents are the last one to know because that disconnection from the parent is one of the dynamics that drive the child to suicide in the first place.

This is so hard to say,

And it may sound like we're blaming parents here or not.

We're talking about a cultural phenomenon that just hits parents and children without either party realizing it.

Yeah.

So when we step into parenthood,

Our own upbringing patterns,

Programming,

Conditioning,

However you want to say it,

We bring our own traumas,

Right,

Into parenting.

Well,

I did.

For sure.

Yeah,

For sure.

For most of us,

I think parenting is this amazing portal.

It shows what we need to work on.

I'm curious in the early years,

What showed up for you with your own history of trauma?

You have amazing children.

Your son wrote this book with you.

Your daughter does the Instagram lives.

She's pursuing her PhD.

What I also want to ask is to give hope to parents who think they are failing or messing up their kids or damaging because it's not about perfect parenting.

When I see you or other people who have amazing relationships with their adult children,

It's really beautiful to watch and it's hopeful.

So I would love for you to say just a few words about that.

Sure.

So first of all,

Daniel,

My son who helped me write this book,

Him and I do a workshop together called Hello Again,

A fresh start for adult children and their parents.

And that's going to be our next book,

Actually.

We had a two book contract.

This Myth of Normal was the first one.

Hello Again will be our second one.

And we're going to do this workshop in New York in Omega at the end of October.

This year?

Yeah,

Yeah,

Out to the 28th.

Oh,

Wow.

Yeah.

It's called Hello Again,

A fresh start for adult children and their parents.

And we encourage adult children and their parents to come.

This is good.

Because we've learned a lot in our own relationship,

Which has been very difficult.

And all our children downloaded the trauma that my wife and I brought into the relationship.

They've had significant challenges in their lives.

They still face challenges.

They've also all come a long way towards working them out.

And our relationship with them has become ever so much better,

But took a lot of conscious work on our part.

In the early years when,

And we talk about this in The Myth of Normal,

In the early years when we were raising children,

My wife,

Ray and I,

We had no idea about how traumatized we were.

So we just naturally acted it out with each other.

And my son Daniel writes in the book about he used to have this nightmare as a child of the floor disappearing from under his feet.

The floor was not the floor,

Because he never knew when there'd be some unbearable tension between my wife and I.

And he's a very sensitive child,

But all of a sudden feel threatened or insecure.

So that was our history.

And all the children had to work on that,

And they continued to.

And as I say,

Daniel and I have also developed this program on how to bring adult children and their parents together in a respectful adult,

Mutually beneficial way for those that want to.

Well,

I'm going to put the information about that workshop in the show notes and we'll post it in the group.

I want to read a tiny line from the book in the last chapter,

Pathways to Wholeness.

I thought it was so profound.

Just in true Gabor Maté style,

You say one sentence,

But it's so profound.

Once again,

It is not the past that has to change or can change,

Only our present relationship to ourselves.

So speak about that.

That's a lesson I really had to learn,

Because before we began recording,

You were telling me that I remind you of your father,

This perennial morose of sad expression.

And people have seen me that way.

The fact is,

You know,

It was never totally true.

Like,

I always play a lot and I laugh a lot and so on,

But there is the kind of sadness on my face that people pick up on.

And I earned that,

If I can put it that way.

You know,

The emotional brain,

The right brain developed before the left one.

And when my emotional brain was developing,

Conditions were terrible for a Jewish infant under the Nazi occupation.

My mother's terrified and terrorized and grief struck emotional states that were constant throughout my first year of life,

Never mind our enforced separation when I was a developmental,

Which also meant that I grew up with a kind of sense of hopelessness,

What I call my ego or persona,

The character from the relentlessly pessimistic donkey.

In some ways,

I was that.

Even intellectually,

I knew better.

For example,

Years after I became a physician and beyond that,

A healer and a well-respected author and so many people thanking for saving their lives or helping their lives,

I think,

Okay,

I can help everybody else,

But I can't be helped myself.

And consciously or intellectually,

I knew that can't be the case,

But that didn't shift the emotional stance.

And what I learned,

Not that long ago actually,

And the learning is described in the book,

Is that,

Yeah,

What happened to me as an infant will never not have happened.

My grandparents will never not have died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

But what I mean by that,

Mean about life and myself,

That can change.

So because that happened,

It doesn't mean that I cannot have joy and presence and optimism and contentment.

And how I see the world doesn't have to be determined by some terrible things that happen in the world.

That for me has been a relatively recent lesson.

But that's the whole point about trauma.

Trauma is not what happened to us,

It's what happens inside us.

So one traumatic imprint was this sense of ego or hopelessness.

Well,

What happened doesn't have to change for me to give up.

I can be more like Winnie the Pooh,

Who says at the end,

You know,

Who just plays all the time,

You know?

So one can go from ego to Winnie,

You know,

One doesn't have to be determined by the past.

And that's what I meant by that passage that you're at.

Yeah,

Thank you for elaborating on that.

How many languages do you speak?

Oh,

Only two functionally,

Hungarian and English.

No.

That's one of my regrets,

By the way,

Is that I haven't studied languages more.

But you know what?

I didn't.

Yeah.

And you don't talk about much,

When you immigrated to Canada,

You were 13 years old,

Right?

So I said that could be a traumatic event or not.

I don't know.

Again,

Trauma is not the event,

But.

.

.

It was difficult because an adolescent needs the family structure even more than.

.

.

Well,

As much as.

.

.

Because it's time of change,

Individuation,

Time of exploring the world,

And you need that anchor of the family.

But for the immigrant family,

That's very difficult because the kids speak English better,

Quicker than the parents do.

We feel more as long as the parents are too busy trying to establish a new life,

A new existence in a strange culture.

So there was a kind of loosening of our family when that happened.

And that was tough at a time of transition.

Yeah.

I mean,

Yeah,

I had experiences myself when I immigrated to the United States.

I mean,

As an adult even,

I know the first time I came here,

It was a pretty traumatic experience.

But definitely,

When you leave parts of yourself,

Your roots,

And you move to a new place,

Yes,

Life is great here,

But that loss you have to reconcile.

Unless you look at it,

It's so painful,

I think.

At least for me,

It was very painful.

I was very cut off from that part of my life for many,

Many years.

I didn't want to even visit my own country.

Well,

So was I.

But you know what?

What's happened now is my books have been published in 30 languages,

Including in Hungarian,

And I've kind of become a star in Hungary.

So the cover article about me in Forbes Hungary just a month ago,

And a podcast of mine has been seen by 700,

000 Hungarians,

Which is like almost 10% of the population.

And when I go back in October to introduce this new book in Hungarian,

The publishers had over 100 podcast interviews.

And I'll tell you something amazing.

When I was there in May,

I went swimming at a swimming club because one of the things I have to do,

Including here in New York,

Is I have to swim every day.

You don't want to talk to me if I haven't sung yet.

Today I have,

So you're in good shape.

I was swimming every day at a swimming club.

Only a few days later did I realize that directly across the street from where I was swimming was the pavement where my mother gave me to a complete stranger to save my life,

And I didn't see her for five or six weeks.

Literally the paving stores are still there where that happened.

Wow.

How,

How,

How did you feel?

What did you feel in that moment?

I'd been to that place before.

I just didn't realize I was looking at it.

I felt moved.

And I also thought who writes the script?

Here I'm swimming at age 78,

I'm swimming for my health opposite the building where I nearly lost my life.

I mean,

Who,

Who designs this?

And you have to think it's bigger than we are,

Isn't it?

Yeah.

Wow.

That's so powerful.

That,

That parallel right there between life and death.

It's so beautiful how you describe that.

Wow.

It's incredible.

Is your son Daniel interested in doing the podcast or talking?

Is he doing press about the book or is not?

I would love to talk to him too.

He would find that quite a trip to talk to my son,

Daniel,

Because he's a brilliant guy and a very super talented in so many ways.

And I'm sure he'd be delighted to speak with you.

So just send us an email and I'll put you in touch with him.

By the way,

He lives here in New York.

So yeah,

He,

He,

He did the audio book,

Right?

He read the audio version of the book.

He's done the audio version of all of my books,

Except the American version of my book on ADHD.

So I'm sure that therefore it's much worse than all the others.

I actually won an award for an audiobook of my book on addiction.

So yeah,

I'm sure Daniel will be very happy to speak with you.

Yeah.

That would be interesting to hear the child's perspective and an adult child's perspective.

Wow.

This is,

This is incredible.

I want to be respectful of your time.

I mean,

I can keep you here and ask you so many other questions,

But I think this is a good place to end.

I want to end with that powerful message.

If you could go back in time,

Like knowing what you know about parenthood,

Attachment,

Trauma,

All of this work that you've done,

What would you say to yourself as a new parent?

Get to know yourself.

Simple,

Profound,

And not so easy.

You know,

There's an archivist survivor,

A very famous author called Primo Levi,

Who wrote wonderful,

He's the best author on genocide.

And he never identified as a victim.

In one of his books,

He says,

Let's not recreate in our families the same conditions that existed in the concentration camps.

And it didn't mean the torture.

He meant let's not make people feel unsafe and threatened and attacked and cut off from each other.

Wow.

That's so powerful.

Yeah.

That,

That,

I mean,

That whole victim or survivor term is off putting for me too.

I've never,

When people said,

Oh,

You are a survivor.

You survived.

I could never relate to that.

And then I read Meg Jay's book.

It's called Super Normal.

I was referring to it the other day.

Have you read that book?

She used it.

She uses it.

It's about a childhood adversity and resilience,

Overcoming childhood diversity and resilience.

I think it's the subtitle Super Normal.

She calls people like us super normal.

She doesn't use the word resilient.

She says it's too primitive.

Like you can use resilience in terms of,

Oh,

I had the flu and I recovered and you know,

I bounced back now or I lost a job and now I,

You know,

I rebounded.

But when it comes to trauma,

Childhood trauma,

She doesn't like that word.

She uses super normal.

And I think it's so powerful.

And I totally relate.

My problem with super normal is that my book is called the myth of normal.

What I think is normal in society is completely unhealthy.

So I guess we all have our words in the way we use them as long as we're consistent.

And it's been really good to talk to you.

Thanks for having me.

Likewise.

Likewise.

Thank you again for speaking to me today.

Congratulations.

This is so big.

This book will change many lives.

That's my fondest hope.

My fondest hope is that it will enrich many lives.

Yes,

It will.

It will change the culture.

Definitely.

Thank you so much for being who you are and being in the world.

Thank you.

That means a lot.

Thanks a lot.

That concludes today's conversation,

My dear listener,

And I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Isn't Dr.

Gabor Maté an incredible human being?

What's your biggest takeaway?

Did you find it useful,

Helpful,

Inspiring?

How you can apply what you gleaned from this episode into your own life?

I love hearing from you.

I welcome your feedback,

Comments,

And questions.

Send me a note to the email info at authenticparenting.

Com.

Call the number 732-763-2576 and leave a voicemail.

And for you,

My international listener,

There is a free tool on the contact page of my website.

Go to authenticparenting.

Com forward slash contact and send me a message.

You can find the show and follow it wherever podcasts are played.

Apple podcasts,

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Spotify,

And elsewhere.

Be sure to get the book,

The Myth of Normal,

Wherever books are sold and join us in the authentic parenting Facebook group to continue the conversation.

As always,

Connect to the present moment,

To yourself and your children.

Until next week,

I am Anna Siewald.

Thank you so much for listening.

Reviews

This had me in goosebumps and tears so so so many times… thank your from the bottom of my heart 🙏🏼🤍💫

This talk touched me deeply, thank you! I was moved to tears, felt my emotions and experienced healing insights.

Anna that was so deeply profound and insightful for me, thank you for this beautiful interview thank you for your authenticity 🙏 your vulnerable sharing truly touched my heart. And Gabors wisdom and insights have helped me understand on a deeper level my own experiences with attachement and repressing my emotions. I feel this is planting new seeds to nourish into the light. Deep deep gratitude 🙏

Thank you Anna this was wonderful