How Our Childhood Shapes Every Aspect of Our Health with Dr. Gabor Maté | FBLM Podcast

Maté says every addiction, from heroin to shopping, regulates an unbearable internal state through external means, and he never saw anyone choose to become an addict. He argues this makes the legal system's punitive logic baseless.

Maté says children can be hurt by bad things that happen or by good things that fail to happen. He cites his own infancy under the Nazis, when his terrorized mother could not be emotionally attuned.

Maté tells Chatterjee that his "addictive personality" was a personality but not his person, an adaptation for surviving childhood. He describes his own ADHD as tuning out learned as an infant, and says we are freer as we strip such defenses away.

Maté says nobody is at fault because unconscious patterns pass down through generations. Becoming conscious of them allows people to be "response able" and to change their physiology and lives.

Maté argues that behaviors flow from childhood wounds, so healing the wound is what changes behavior. Merely adjusting external habits is superficial.