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

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:03 So Dr. Maté, it's a huge pleasure for me to be talking to you today. I've been following your work for a good period of time now, and it's had a huge impact on the way that I look after my patients. But if I'm honest, it's also had a huge impact on the way I look after myself.

Dr. Gabor Maté 0:18 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:18 And, uh, I wanna thank you for that. Um, there's so many things that we could start talking about, but I think the place I'd like to start is something I heard you say once, which is, "Addiction is not a choice."

Dr. Gabor Maté 0:35 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:37 I think most of society probably thinks that it is a choice, and so I wonder if you could clarify that.

Dr. Gabor Maté 0:45 The whole legal system is based on the assumption that people are making the choice to indulge in addictions, and therefore, the decisions they make, um, that flow, uh, from that are conscious and deliberate. And therefore, of course, what they need to do is to be punished for making such a choice. It's basically the same attitude that a lot of people take towards child-rearing. When a child does something we don't like, we punish them. This is our idea of child-rearing. Well, with adults, the punishment is called jail or legal sanctions. Um, m- the assumption is totally false. There's no scientific basis to it, and having worked with addicts, really seriously caught people who've been entrapped in the cycle and, and, and shoals of addiction with, with all the consequences like HIV, homelessness, loss of health, wealth, teeth, beauty, personal relationships, I never saw any instance of anybody having chosen to become that way. And having had my own addictive behaviors, I can also tell you I never chose... I never woke up one morning and said, "My ambition is to become an a- become an addict." So it's an entirely sh- shallow, behaviorist view of human beings, and what we need to do is to look at the deeper reasons. If what, uh, something appears to be a choice, it's an unconscious one, and we still have to look at what is it that would drive a person in that direction. Conscious choice has nothing to do with it, which means to say that the legal system has no logical basis to stand on.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:21 Yeah. Yeah, it, it's, it's amazing how we have decided as a society that some addictions are criminal but some are okay.

Dr. Gabor Maté 2:30 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:30 You know? Where, and I've heard you talk about that many times in the past. I think that, that makes me think of a, a line in your, in your, in your new book. Well, I say new. It's been out for over 10 years, I think. It's, um, been a bestseller all over the world, but we've got it now in the UK, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. And in the introduction you say, "All drugs and all behaviors of addiction, substance dependent or not, whether gambling, sex, the internet, or cocaine, all of them either soothe pain directly or distracts from it." Hence, your mantra, "The first question is not why the addiction but why the pain." Uh, and I think that beautifully sums it up-

Dr. Gabor Maté 3:10 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:10 ... um, you know, in, in, in that you, you're liking, you're likening addiction to drugs, potentially to, you know, sex, gambling, alcohol, maybe shopping. Um-

Dr. Gabor Maté 3:25 Well, so I've had my own shopping addiction, and I can tell you that the, what happens in my brain when I'm indulging in my shopping addiction is exactly the same that happens in the brain of the cocaine addict.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:36 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 3:36 In other words, there's an excitation of the reward incentive and motivation circuitry, and what the addict is after is that temporary change in brain status. Really what it is, all addictions are an attempt to regulate an unbearable emotional state internally. But you're trying to regulate your internal state through external means, and that's what an addiction is. So temporarily you get a change in the state of your brain and a change of your physiology. You can do that through drugs. You can also do it through gambling or internet or sex or shopping. But essentially, you're after that same revitalization of your i- incentive and motivation circuitry of your brain. And so from my perspective, there's only one universal addiction process that dominates all addicted people. The targets of addiction may be different. The internal effects are much the same.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:30 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 4:31 And, and I'm sorry, I should add, when you look at the c- the, the, the sources of it, the states that people are trying to escape are states of emotional distress, states of emotional pain. And hence, why the addiction. Not why the addiction, but why the pain.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:46 So some people who are listening to this or, or watching this right now might be thinking, "Yeah, I get that. That, that all sounds fine, um, for those people who are addicted, but I, of course, am not addicted to anything." So you've g- you've got a rather beautiful definition, I think, of addiction, which I think will be really helpful to sort of-

Dr. Gabor Maté 5:03 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:03 ... go through at the start here so that people listening can actually figure out if it does relate to them or not.

Dr. Gabor Maté 5:10 Well, when I speak to a room of people and I ask them how many are addicted, most people will only think of drugs, so some people put their hand up. Then I give them my broader definition of addiction, and now everybody puts their hand up. And that definition is that an addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves but suffers negative consequences in the long term and is unable to give it up. So any behavior, not just drugs. The key hallmarks are craving pleasure or relief in the short term, negative outcomes in the long term, inability to g- to give it up. That's what an addiction is, and that could be to drugs, uh, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, the legal, the lethal and legal substances- Or it could be to heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, fentanyl, cannabis, any number of other substances. But it could also be to sex, to gambling, to shopping, to eating, to work, to exercise, to the internet, to gaming, to pornography, to political power, to the acquisition of wealth, to the hoarding of objects, anything. And by, and when you give that definition, and you ask people, "How many here would acknowledge some addiction in their life sometimes?" The vast majority of people would put their hands up, which means to say that addictions are on a continuum, it's on a spectrum, and they're distributed, dispersed throughout all of our society. And so that the identified drug addicts make up only a small, narrow segment of our addicted population.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:50 So really the whole way we, we think about addiction, the way we criminalize various forms of addiction really needs to change to a much more, a more compassionate way of dealing with it, but also really trying to understand what's the root cause. Because if, you know, I s- totally subscribe to your theories, and I, and I, and I think that ultimately if the root cause of all addiction or all addictive behavior is the same, how do we tackle that? And where does that come from? What is that root cause?

Dr. Gabor Maté 7:20 So once you're asking not why the addiction, but why the pain, now you have to forget that it's a choice, because nobody chooses to be in pain. And you also have to forget the medical idea that it's an inherited brain disease. You actually have to look at people's lives. Now, in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in Canada, where I worked for 12 years with a highly addicted population, these people had, uh, multiple addictions, cocaine, alcohol, cannabis, uh, opiates of all kinds, cigarettes in every case. They suffered with HIV, with hepatitis C. They would die of overdoses, suicide, um, infections of all kinds. And these people, every single one of them had been heavily traumatized in childhood. All the women I worked with over 12 years had been sexually abused. All the men had been neglected or beaten or emotionally abused. I'm talking about now the severely addicted population, which is also what the large-scale study shows, that, uh, the greater the childhood adversity, the greater risk for addiction in adulthood. Now, the more severe the childhood adversity, the greater the risk of substance addiction and injection use. However, if you look at my own case, um, I wasn't beaten. I wasn't abused in my family of origin. Um, I wasn't neglected, but I was a Jewish infant born during the war in Hungary, um, and spent my first year under the Nazi re- Nazi regime. You can imagine under what circumstances. So I had a very unhappy, stressed, terrorized mother. And children can be hurt in two ways. Children can get, children can be hurt when bad things happen to them that shouldn't happen. That's the abuse, that's the violence in the family, that's the parental addiction. But children can also be hurt when their needs are not met. Now, I had this need for an attuned, empathetic, emotionally responsive mother. She couldn't be that, not because she didn't love me, not because she didn't do her best, but simply she was too terrorized, she was too depressed. The lack of that joyful, attuned, loving mother who, I, I shouldn't say loving because she loved me tremendously, but her love couldn't be translated into responsive behavior. That alone was enough to hurt me. So in other words, the source of addiction is always some kind of a childhood hurt, either because bad things happened that shouldn't have, or because the good things that should have happened couldn't happen because of the parents' emotional states. Both of these are enough to hurt the child, uh, in a way to driving them to self-soothe through addictions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:09 So, so do you think your own experience of trauma really-

Dr. Gabor Maté 10:15 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:15 ... uh, uh, as a, as a young baby-

Dr. Gabor Maté 10:17 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:17 ... not even a child, as a young baby-

Dr. Gabor Maté 10:18 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:18 ... has impacted your own health, your own behaviors, and therefore, ultimately, where you are today, which is one of the world's leading voices on trauma and addiction. Do you think that has been instrumental in you getting to where you are today?

Dr. Gabor Maté 10:33 Having to deal with the impacts of that has been instrumental. I mean, I really, uh, as an adult, uh, I was a successful physician. You know, I was much in demand, uh, family practitioner. I was head of a palliative care department at a major hospital. I was a national medical columnist to a Canadian newspaper in my 50s, and internally I was driven, workaholic, depressed, uh, affected by ADHD, um, anxious, and unfulfilled and unsatisfied. And it's when looking at those dynamics and wondering, "Well, what the heck has happened to me here, and what is the gap between my external persona and my internal experience of myself?" That's when I began to deal with trauma. Not to mention, as a family physician, and you and I were talking about this before, we get to see patients before they get sick. The specialists only see them after the illness has been diagnosed. I get to see people before they get ill. I get to see people in the context of their multi-generational family background. So we have a much broader view of who gets sick and why. And so both through my medical work and having to deal with my own stuff, I began to realize the central role of trauma in shaping people health or illness.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:49 Yeah, since I've, since I've been studying trauma myself, um, both with the work that you do, but just other things that I'm reading around it, it really helps me understand my patients.

Dr. Gabor Maté 12:00 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:01 And their behavior is much better. I really start to You can start to tap in now as to what they're coming in with more. You think, "Oh, that's... What's going on behind that?" Not the symptom they're describing, but, but why are they making those choices? And something you may not know, Gabor, I, I- a few years ago I did, um, a series of documentaries on BBC One called Doctor in the House, and what I would do on that is I went to live alongside families who had health problems.

Dr. Gabor Maté 12:28 Hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:28 They were already under GPs, they were already under specialists. They were all taking medication pretty much already, and they still weren't getting better, and they were still struggling. So I went in to... Sometimes I'd stay the night in their houses. I'd live-

Dr. Gabor Maté 12:42 Hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:42 ... alongside them. Really get to understand, you know, what choices they were making with their lifestyle, sure, but also I'd get to see, you know, various dynamics in the family, the sort of thing that would never come up in the consultation room. Even if you asked that question, they would never even think to bring those things up, but you would just start to spot things and, and little dynamics. And I found that with every single family pretty much now, if I f- if I reflect back on all those families I stayed alongside, I was very fortunate to get really good health outcomes with them all after about six weeks.

Dr. Gabor Maté 13:15 Hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:17 But there was a huge emotional component behind a lot of the illness.

Dr. Gabor Maté 13:23 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:23 Um, now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that it was in their head at all. They had proper physical symptoms that were, that they were struggling with, and obviously that in some ways can make people feel down a little bit about themselves because they're not feeling so good. But I really got the strong sense that when you start to look at their lives and their upbringing and how they saw themselves, it, it was just, it was uncanny how many times their emotional health was absolutely tied into their physical health.

Dr. Gabor Maté 13:53 Well, so one of the books I've written, which will be published in Britain in a few months, is entitled When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, and I'm making the case precisely as I heard you articulate just now, is that when it comes to chronic illness, and whether it's colitis or Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS, or, or motor neuron disease in, in England, uh, malignancy, um, chronic psoriasis, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, the physiological symptoms, which are not in people's heads in the sense that they're imagining them, but it very much originates in people's heads in that it has a lot to do with certain relational and emotional patterns that they adopted in childhood. In other words, what I'm saying is that because of childhood programming, people impose certain unconscious stresses on themselves, and those stresses, because of the unity of mind and body, which unfortunately is not taught or recognized in the medical schools, but which scientifically is not even vaguely controversial. Because the immune system and the emotional apparatus and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are part and parcel of the same system. So when something occurs emotionally, which it does on a chronic basis, that has an impact of undermining people's physiology, turning their immune system against themselves or suppressing the immune system. So I absolutely agree that people's emotional patterns, which reflect not individual choices or mistakes, but multi-generational patterns in the family, those emotional patterns translate into physical illness. And, and, and, and, and if we can address those emotional dynamics, we can actually have an impact on the physiological course of their illness, which is again, not something that anybody in medical school will ever tell you because there's this unfortunate separation of mind and body that you and I are trained in.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:41 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the key, one of the key things there for me was that you s- you're not putting blame on people.

Dr. Gabor Maté 15:47 There's no blame.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:48 Yeah, and I think that's really, really a key point to, that maybe we can discuss now because a lot of people may be hearing that feeling, you know, "Maybe I've done this to myself," or, "My mother did this to me," for example. Uh, and that's not what you're saying at all, is it?

Dr. Gabor Maté 16:04 Well, um, th- this is an interesting conversation. I make the distinction between blame and responsibility.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:13 Okay.

Dr. Gabor Maté 16:13 Blame says that you did something that you could have done otherwise, and so you're, therefore, you're at fault. That's what blame says. Responsibility says, yes, you did this to yourself, but not consciously or deliberately. You did it because you were programmed to do it by your own childhood experience, which in turn was, uh, um, mm, programmed by your parents' childhood experience. So there's nobody at fault. Everybody does their best, but we do pass these unconscious patterns on. And you don't blame people for having unconscious patterns. You try to make them conscious of it so they can take responsibility for it. So there's no con- there's no responsibility without consciousness.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:53 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 16:54 And so, and, and there's no blame. So I don't blame anybody for their illness. I don't blame their parents either. But I do say these unconscious patterns have been passed on, and these unconscious emotional dynamics have an impact on your physiology. That's all. And if you want to have an impact on your physiology, you've gotta get conscious. You have to realize what have you been doing unconsciously so you can stop doing it or do it differently. So it's a matter of liberating people from these ingrained patterns for which they're not to be blamed. So in my world, there's no room for blame whatsoever, but there is room for helping people become responsible, for helping people being response able, being able to respond to their circumstances. And without awareness, none of us are response able.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:39 Yeah, I think i- if I think to my own life and my own health journey over the last few years, and I guess what's really changed for me over the last few years, you know, I've done a lot with my lifestyle.

Dr. Gabor Maté 17:50 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:50 I've done a lot with my nutrition, my sleep, and, and those things have been great, and they've really helped me. But over the last few years, I've really been focused on my emotional health. You know?

Dr. Gabor Maté 17:57 Okay.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:58 I, I, I see a therapist pretty regularly. Um, and I can always feel when I've got something new, some, some deeper layer that's starting to come out. You know, I, I have, I have a session or I g- I go through some sort of therapy and I- I feel good. I feel, "Oh, yeah, you know, I've, I've got it now. I get it. I get it why I do this." And, and it changes your behavior certainly. But it's almost as a, a, as if you, as you do that, th- there's multiple layers. It's like peeling back a layer of the, you know, it's peeling back layers of the onion and newer things keep coming out. Um, which has been, it's been really rewarding for me because it, you know, you talk about addiction, and I, I think back to my, my own life and various things that I've done at certain points, you know, I don't think anyone who knows me well, uh, maybe my close friends but [laughs]

Dr. Gabor Maté 18:43 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:43 ... but most people probably wouldn't think that I've ever had an addiction because we have all these connotations about addiction, you know, you know, it's like, you know, being, uh, being on a street corner-

Dr. Gabor Maté 18:53 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:53 ... or being a drug addict or something.

Dr. Gabor Maté 18:54 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:55 But, but everyone around me would know that I've got an addicted personality.

Dr. Gabor Maté 18:59 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:59 And I used to think that that was my personality. That's the way I was born.

Dr. Gabor Maté 19:04 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:04 What's weird, that as I start to process my own emotional baggage and I start to clear it, I'm no longer as an addictive person as I used to be. And, and that's why really I kind of feel, I feel so strongly about the work that you're doing because I kind of feel that that wasn't my personality, that was the behavior I had chosen to soothe something that I was missing. And-

Dr. Gabor Maté 19:30 Well, so what I, how would I would put it, I, I mean, I agree with your concept. I would use, use a different language to understand.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:35 Sure.

Dr. Gabor Maté 19:36 That was your personality, but it wasn't your person. It wasn't who you were. The personality itself is a defensive structure that we develop as a way of dealing with our pain. So much of what we consider to be our personality is actually, um, an overlay, uh, upon our true selves. And so these are choices in childhood. For example, um, with my ADD, the tuning out, I never chose to tune out. But when I was an infant under the conditions that I've described of being a Jewish infant under the Nazis, I had plenty of stress on me. And how does an infant deal with stress that they can't change? They tune out. And then the tuning out becomes programmed into my brain. And then so many years later, I'm diagnosed with ADD. It wasn't a choice that I made, it was an adaptation. So I would, what I would say about the personality, including what you describe as your addictive personality, it wasn't you, it was an adaptation that you took on as a way of surviving your childhood, as a way of soothing your pain. It's when we got older that we realized that there's something more to us than a personality, that the personality is actually a defensive cover for who we truly are. And as we start, like as you describe your own process, you go through therapy and you go through layers, and then you realize, "Oh, that's not actually me."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:59 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 20:59 "And, and I'm freer without it." Then you realize that what we thought was the personality was actually just a defensive cover. Uh, and, and once we strip that defense off and we find it no longer necessary, we become much more truer to ourselves, mu- much more true to ourselves, so become much more balanced and happier in our lives. So yes, it was the personality, but you are not your personality.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:25 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 21:25 That's, that's how I would formulate it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:27 Yeah, no, I, I lo- I love the way you put that, actually. It really, really [laughs] helps me think about it in a slightly different way. Um, and then something came into my mind there, which is, you know, and we were chatting a little bit about this before we got on air, um, about medicine and how i- how reductionist it has become, the practice of medicine. And I think like something like high blood pressure, for example-

Dr. Gabor Maté 21:49 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:49 ... I think of as an appropriate response from the body to the signals that it's been given.

Dr. Gabor Maté 21:56 Absolutely.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:57 And I think there's an analogy there with what you're saying, which is if you, if you're surrounded by stress as a young baby, whatever that stress is, your brain is gonna adapt to that. It's an appropriate response to the signals that your brain is getting. Is that fair to say?

Dr. Gabor Maté 22:15 That's right. So, so my next book is gonna be entitled The Myth of Normal: Illness and Health in an Insane Culture. And when I say in culture, insane culture, I mean a culture that doesn't meet human needs. So if you take a, a condition like high blood pressure, for which what's the medical term for high blood pressure?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:37 Hypertension.

Dr. Gabor Maté 22:38 Hypertension. Okay. And, and, and doctors of course say, our colleagues say, "Well, there's a few types of hypertension for which there's a cause, like kidney disease or some kind of hormonal disorder." But for most part, we don't know what causes high blood pressure.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:53 Essential hypertension.

Dr. Gabor Maté 22:53 Essential. We call it essential, which basically is we don't know what the heck we're talking about. That's what that means. Just take the word hypertension and slow it down a bit. Hypertension. Hypertension. Hypertension. Maybe there's too much tension in people's lives, you know? And if you actually look at the, the rising rates of, of, of, of hypertension, it's got to do with social pressure and social stresses. And I know that b- usually when I take care of myself, I have the blood pressure of a, of a young person, but there's been times in my life when I've been driven by stress, and I've had, uh, blood pressure ranges in the, in the, in the risky, uh, end of the scale. So, so for me, when my blood pressure goes up, it's a real warning, "Buddy, you've got too much tension in your lives. You better do something about it." All we do in medicine is we hand out pills or we tell people to lose weight, but we never address the sources of real tension in their lives. And I'd say that most hypertension, i- and so for example, if you look at a Black, Black American males, they have much higher risk of hypertension than, say, white American males. What we say is genetic. No, it isn't. Their biological relatives in Africa do not have high blood pressure.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:05 Right.

Dr. Gabor Maté 24:06 So it's an artifact of being a Black male in essentially a racist society. And, uh, James Baldwin, the American writer, once said that being a Black American male is to live in a condition of suppressed rage all the time.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:19 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 24:19 Well, that suppressed rage will drive your blood pressure. So, uh, uh, hypertension-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:23 And drive other ill health.

Dr. Gabor Maté 24:25 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:25 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 24:26 So, so high blood pressure is a great example of a, a, a socially induced physiological, physiological condition which is mediated through our emotions and the impact of our emotions on our autonomic nervous system and on our hormones.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:41 Yeah. It's, uh, I mean, I've never really thought about the term hypertension like that before.

Dr. Gabor Maté 24:47 No.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:47 You know, hypertension, and it, and it makes such sense-

Dr. Gabor Maté 24:50 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:50 ... when we think about it like that. You, you mentioned this, this new book you're writing, talking about how we've got a, I think you... Is it an insane society around us?

Dr. Gabor Maté 24:57 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:58 And I, I think of, I think of stress, you know. As I, as I've mentioned to you, I've, I've just spent a few months locked away writing a new book on stress called The Stress Solution.

Dr. Gabor Maté 25:09 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:09 And I, I, I feel strongly that when we talk about making changes... So a lot of people when they try and improve their health, they try and improve their lifestyle, okay? Which is a pretty reasonable start.

Dr. Gabor Maté 25:24 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:25 But many people I find can't do that, or they do it temporarily for a few weeks, a few days, a few months maybe, but then they revert back. And as a doctor, I've always been intrigued as to why do some patients keep coming back, and why do some patients with the same so-called problem get better with the, with the-

Dr. Gabor Maté 25:45 Hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:45 ... same course of, of treatments?

Dr. Gabor Maté 25:47 Right, right.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:48 And, and I always think, "Well, if they keep coming back, I'm clearly not getting to the root cause of the problem." And the more I think about your work, although people talk about you in the, in the realm of addiction and trauma, I think your work doesn't only explain addiction and trauma, it explains all human behavior, and therefore has profound implications not only for trauma, not only for pain, not only for addiction, but actually the whole of the health landscape.

Dr. Gabor Maté 26:21 Well, thank you. And again, in my various books I've written about that. Um, it just so happens that it's my addiction book that's being published right now, first in England. Um, when you get down to it, it's very simple. Either you raise human beings who- whose n- needs are met, or you raise human beings in a way that you don't meet their needs. When you don't meet people's needs, they have to adapt in, uh, artificial ways. Those adaptations become the sources of illness later on. There was a very interesting article in the journal Pediatrics, which is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, published in January 2012. It was an article on childhood development generated by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, so as prestigious as you get. And in the abstract they say that human environments that because of scarcity or stress, uh, trouble young children, cause these children to make adaptations which are ne- psychological and physiological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a long-term cost to health, behavior, uh, and longevity. In other words, the way that young children adapt to, um, to stress early on helps them survive that early stress. But in the long term, those same adaptations become sources of pathology. So if you, if you look at my own tuning out, so the, the tuning out that I did as an infant under conditions of severe psychological strain is an adaptation. It helped me as an infant survive a year where the situation was utterly impossible. But that same tuning out gets programmed into my brain, and now I'm diagnosed with a medical condition, ADHD, decades later. So what was ad- was adaptive in one circumstance becomes maladaptive later on. I'm suggesting that much of illness, uh, begins with that, that, that these are necessary personally adaptations, however, which then stress us later on. And so that there's a real... So, so what's common to my work is that I look at the sources of adult function or dysfunction in our formative experiences. And you know, that's not controversial if you look at a gardener. I mean, if a gardener looks at their plants, they know that how they treat that young plant will have a huge impact on the, on the adult plant. Anybody who is in animal husbandry will realize that how you treat the young, whether it's a dog or a horse, will have a huge impact on the personality and behavior of that animal later on. Why don't we get the same thing in human beings? It's the same principle. So it's essentially very simple.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:17 Yeah, it really is, isn't it? When you, when you break it down to the-

Dr. Gabor Maté 29:20 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:20 ... like that, it, it, it's super simple. We need to, we need a society that really supports children-

Dr. Gabor Maté 29:26 Absolutely

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:26 ... and babies and mothers and, and parents at a young age.

Dr. Gabor Maté 29:29 Absolutely.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:29 And then w- I guess what comes to my mind is, and you may know the stats on this, I don't, but we here in the UK, we always are talking about Scandinavia, and we talk about how they are really, uh, prioritizing those early years. You know, they give a lot of maternity leave, a lot of paternity leave. Um, you know, yes, they may have high taxes, but it seems to me that their society there has prioritized family and bringing up children, whereas I don't think we're quite as good here, and I... But I don't think we're as bad as, uh, the US.

Dr. Gabor Maté 30:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:02 Um, when I... A really good friend of mine, he married an American girl, and she, uh, I can't remember, but maybe after she gave birth to her first child, she might have been back at work, it might've been something like four weeks or something-

Dr. Gabor Maté 30:17 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:17 ... something obscene, like to me, or it sounds obscene to me.

Dr. Gabor Maté 30:20 Absolutely.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:21 And the child's in daycare.

Dr. Gabor Maté 30:22 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:23 And I wonder- I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, how society is set up now, and then what that is doing. 'Cause you mentioned your mum's ... Clearly that's a huge trauma.

Dr. Gabor Maté 30:34 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:34 I mean, that's hopefully the sort of trauma that most of us aren't experiencing. But are there similarities in terms of what that's doing to the child?

Dr. Gabor Maté 30:43 Oh, absolutely. Um, so the United States, uh, [laughs] which, uh, to hear their politicians, is the best and most glorious country in the world, which itself, by the way, is interesting. Like, if you met a person, if, if your neighbor was always telling you how great he was and how he's the best and everybody wants to be like him, what would you think of him?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:04 [laughs] Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 31:06 You'd think he's got a grandiose personality disorder and he's compensating for his real sense of deficiency. Well, that's the United States, and they have a lot to compensate for. And what you say about childcare is absolutely true, is that they have a barbaric childcare system and a barbaric maternity leave system, where women, and often poor women on welfare, have to go back to work after a few weeks of, of, of giving birth. Now, if you look at human evolution or y- or look at an ape culture, the ape mothers hold their babies for months. There's no separation. The child actually develops by, through being held by the mother. And human be- societies, until very recently, were organized around children being around their parents really all their lives, certainly through a childhood and adolescence. There was just no separation. What we do in our culture, more in the States than elsewhere, but increasingly elsewhere as well, we separate children from their parents. In other words, we're depriving them from the natural conditions for healthy development. Now, there was a study last year or two years ago comparing the crying of British, German, Canadian, and Danish children. Lo and behold, Danish kids cried much less than these others. What was the difference? The parents were around much more, and the parents were much more likely to pick up the kids when they were crying. That's what made the difference. Now, that crying child is an anxious child. When the child is crying, it's not just a benign thing. The child is crying because they're stressed. When they're stressed, their brains are suffused by stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline and cortisol interfere with your physiology, interfere with healthy brain development. So just the fact of holding a child, which was historically and prehistorically the standard, um, is, is, is an essential aspect of child-rearing which modern societies have denied. And as a matter of fact, I don't know what it's like in England, but in North America, we actually advise parents not to pick up their kids. When they're crying at night, we tell them not to pick them up. Help ... We sleep-train the kid by not picking them up. In other words, we're denying the child's needs for connection.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:28 And what's that doing to the child, do you think?

Dr. Gabor Maté 33:30 Well, it does a, a number of things. Uh, one is to give the child the message that his emotions don't matter, and, and children take everything personally. It's not true that babies don't have emotions, and it's not true that babies are tabula rasa where you can write anything you want. Babies have certain defined emotional needs, and when they get the message that they're not important, that's the message they're gonna imbibe unconsciously, non-verbally, and you can see that behavior in the adults. You know the person who comes into your office and says, uh, "Doc, I'm sorry to bother you. I'm sure you have many people much more important than me, but I have this little problem." You know what kind of a childhood they had.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:10 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 34:11 Um, number one, so it gives them the-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:12 That would be me going into the doctor.

Dr. Gabor Maté 34:14 Okay.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:15 Or in, in just various aspects of my life, and you know, the people pleaser.

Dr. Gabor Maté 34:21 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:21 Always doing, you know, always, "Yeah, yeah, no problem." You know, the amount of times I think just on a social thing you'd be like, "Oh, where do you wanna go, guys?" "Yeah, yeah, no worries. Wherever, wherever." You end up somewhere you just don't wanna be in. You're in a restaurant you hate the food in.

Dr. Gabor Maté 34:32 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:32 But, "Hey, yeah, it's cool, guys. No problem." And it's ... Sorry, I don't mean to trivialize what you're saying. It's, and I guess-

Dr. Gabor Maté 34:37 No, you're, you're not trivializing it. What you're actually illustrating, you're telling me exactly what kind of infancy you had.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:43 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 34:44 And, um, physiologically, what does it do? The baby's crying, and again, these stress hormones. Now, one of the things that Aboriginal peoples don't do is let their babies cry. When I say it's not that they forbid them to cry, they pick them up. They don't even put them down, to tell you the truth. But should they cry, they pick them up immediately. We, in our society, we actually advise people to let the babies cry. When the baby's crying, it's 'cause they're stressed. When they're stressed, again, their brains are suffused by stress hormones. That interferes with healthy brain development.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:18 Yeah. I mean, what about this whole idea that, um, you know, we're quite isolated now. You know, many of us have moved away from where we grew up.

Dr. Gabor Maté 35:27 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:28 We don't have friends. We don't have a family network around us, so, and often two parents are working.

Dr. Gabor Maté 35:34 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:35 So you've got this really stressful situation where everyone's trying to do the best that they can.

Dr. Gabor Maté 35:40 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:40 They're trying to, you know, make enough money to feed themselves, to house themselves. They're also trying to spend enough time with their children, yet they have no support. So there's a huge amount of pressure then that goes onto the kids, but also on the parents.

Dr. Gabor Maté 35:53 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:54 And I think ... I, I saw you talk last night, um, at The Tabernacle in London. It was a, it was a, you know, an amazing talk, and you mentioned a little bit about hunter-gatherer societies, and how for the bulk of human evolution we have lived and raised our children a certain way.

Dr. Gabor Maté 36:11 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:11 I wonder if you could expand on that.

Dr. Gabor Maté 36:12 Well, a- again, human beings, some version of human beings have been on the Earth for millions of years. There've been hominids for millions of years. There have been human species for hundreds of thousands of years, and our own particular species probably for about 100,000 years. ... Homo sapiens, which is the latest and the only current human species that's extant. For all of that prehistory until about 9,000 years ago, virtually all human beings lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. This is a revolution. This is how we became human beings. So to think that, y- now, now you might liken modern society to a zoo, where you take an animal from a natural habitat and you put them in a completely artificial restricted situation, and you expect him to stay as normal as he was out there in the wild. Essentially, that's what's happened to human beings, in that in a very short space of time, in the blink of an eye from the perspective of evolution, we've been, we've gone from the hunter-gatherer, small band, communal, attachment-based group to a society which is alienated, disconnected, and that disconnection is, m- uh, is, is, um, accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world. Um, urbanization, it's taking people out of their villages and into the big cities where they're alone. Uh, here in Britain, uh, there was quite a deliberate assault on community under the Thatcher regime with the destruction of neighborhoods and communities and so on, and, uh, that trend has continued. So what we're having in is societies that are less and less natural to the actual makeup of human beings from the evolutionary perspective, and which means that children are being brought up under increasingly artificial and disconnected circumstances. And, uh, you know, Johann Hari, who's written a book recently on dep-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:16 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 38:16 ... uh, uh, on, on, on depression called Lost Connections, is pointing exactly at what's happening in modern society, so that these lost connections characterize the modern world, and as they do, you're getting the spread of autoimmune disease into countries that never used to have it before.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:34 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 38:35 So we think autoimmune disease is one of these, uh... Or addictions for that matter. So if you look at the rate of addiction now in, in countries like, uh, China and India, it's going up exponentially precisely because of the, uh... And it's, and it's no question of idealizing the old way of life.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:51 No.

Dr. Gabor Maté 38:51 I m- we can't go back, and, and, and of course there's all kinds of benefits to, to progress and industrialization. Trouble is that as we progress, we forget the benefits of, uh, we forget what we've lost. So instead of combining progress with trying to hold on to what was best about some of the old ways, we just throw everything out, and, and we think we can reinvent ourselves, and as we do, we're making ourselves sick.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:15 Yeah. You're right, and I think it's a really great point to, to, to, to sort of bring up. We're not saying we need to go back to hunter-gatherer tribes.

Dr. Gabor Maté 39:21 We can't.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:22 We, yeah, n- not only should we not, we can't.

Dr. Gabor Maté 39:24 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:24 And then there are so many great benefits of the modern world and-

Dr. Gabor Maté 39:27 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:27 ... as you say, industrialization. I guess it's, it's how do we learn from the past, how do we learn from our evolutionary heritage, and what can we implement from that within the constraints of the modern world? That, certainly that's how I see it. And you mentioned, uh, Johann Hari's new book, and, you know, I, I write, a huge quarter of my book on stress is about this. Um, it's about relationships and our-

Dr. Gabor Maté 39:50 Yeah, yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:51 ... our, our lack of connection these days. You know, on, on one level we are, w- we're being told anyway that we're more connected than we've ever been before.

Dr. Gabor Maté 40:02 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:02 And certainly in a digital sense that may be the case, but, you know, when we talk about real human meaningful connection, what I see around me with the public, but what I also see in my practice as a doctor, is I don't think we've ever been this disconnected and lonely. And-

Dr. Gabor Maté 40:20 Well, we're more wired, but we're less connected, is, is how I would put it. Um, because genuine connection happens between people, not between pieces of technology. So as you and I are talking to each other, there's a real interaction.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:33 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 40:33 When you speak, I'm looking at you, I'm listening to the modulation of your voice. I may nod in agreement or shake my head in disagreement, vice versa, but the communication is taking place on many different levels. That's a connection. If you and I were having the same conversation online, it'd be a whole different, um, ballgame, and I'd have no idea actually who I'm talking to. They'd just be exchanging words. So we're wired together, but we're not actually connected. We're actually disconnected in this world, 'cause people are isolated modules sending out messages via the, uh, ethernet or the internet.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:08 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 41:09 Um, when it comes to addictions, i- it- it's, i- it's that disconnection again, um, that, that leaves us so alone. So we're traumatized in the first place. We are then, um, develop, we then develop behaviors that soothe our pain, but which actually keeps us more isolated from other people, 'cause we're ashamed of ourselves and we hide it and, and we, uh, furtively seek out our addictive pleasures. And that disconnection then furthers our sense of isolation. That isolation furthers our pain, and that pain further drives our addiction. So we live in a society that actually generates addiction in many of its members.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:53 Yeah. It really does, doesn't it? I've, I, I did a, um, I did a post on my social media channels I think just yesterday actually-

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:00 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:00 ... about, uh, friendship.

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:03 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:03 And I was saying that, look, s- seeing your friends in real life-

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:08 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:08 ... so not over the internet, in real life, is, um, a necessity for human health, not a luxury. And I know myself, I've neglected some of the friendships closest to me over the last few years-

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:19 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:19 ... 'cause I've been busy with my career and my family, and so that, you know... And you sort of see on social media what your friends are doing, so you feel less of a need-

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:27 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:27 ... to actually see them in, in real life. And I was, uh, really surprised with how- How, how much that post on social media resonated with people.

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:37 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:37 So many people started interacting and saying, "Yeah, you know what? I've not seen my friends in months."

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:42 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:42 You know, yes, I've, I've maybe had a, a bit of a text con- conversation with them, but I've not seen them in real life. And-

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:47 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:47 ... this is me trying to sort of challenge everyone to say, "Hey, look, get a date in the diary now, even if it's in two months' time, with one of your friends. Email them, call them, text them, whatever, but put a date in the diary where you're going to see your friends-

Dr. Gabor Maté 42:59 Absolutely

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:59 ... in real life." And, and it's crazy, isn't it? That we need to, to say these things when these things have always been there in human culture, yet we're now having to talk about them and remind, remind us what has, what has just been our norm for so many thousands, millions of years.

Dr. Gabor Maté 43:16 And what's interesting, of course, is that on Facebook, we use the same language as we would in real life. So on Facebook, people have friends.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:24 [laughs]

Dr. Gabor Maté 43:25 But these friends that we have, these are people we don't know, we have nothing necessarily in common with except maybe certain cultural ideas or interests. And so these friendships aren't genuinely supportive relationships. They're pseudo friendships, and we actually substitute the one for the other. And then on Facebook, people like each other, but, but, but, but, but which are again, is a substitute for genuine contact. But it's not that they like each other. They don't, they don't even know each other. You don't know somebody until you hung out with them. And, and so we substitute the language of friendship, and we substitute the language of connection for genuine friendship and genuine connection, and then we wonder why we feel so lonely and why we, we're so dissatisfied.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:06 And why we are seeking pleasure or seeking to numb that discomfort with the choices we're making, whether it is-

Dr. Gabor Maté 44:16 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:16 ... heroin, cocaine, or shopping and sugar.

Dr. Gabor Maté 44:20 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:22 Because I guess, you know, a lot of people listening to my podcast are trying to make lifestyle change, and a lot of them feel inspired to do so by what they hear. But some of them, um, I know are, are struggling.

Dr. Gabor Maté 44:34 Well, you know, I'm very interested in language and, and even the phrase lifestyle change. It's not lifestyle changes people need to make. It's life changes people need to make.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:44 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 44:44 You can change the style-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:46 [laughs]

Dr. Gabor Maté 44:46 ... but style is a rather superficial thing. You know, the style of clothing, you know? Uh, it's the life changes that people need, and, and, and we need to p- help people see the life changes that are required, not the lifestyle changes they need to require. It is, it's the fundamental life that's being lived that needs to change, not, not the external behaviors. And lifestyle largely refers to behaviors, but not necessarily a transformation within. And really, to deal with addiction, um, is not a question of dealing with the lifestyle. It's a question of dealing with the life, and it's a question of really owning the life, that this is my life, and I'm the one who needs to be, uh, the agent of my own life. And here are the reasons why the, the, the wound or the trauma is another word for wound, actually. So the wounding that I received as a child has had me behave in certain ways. It's not those behaviors I need to change. I need to heal that wound. I need to change my life. And then the, the, the, the, the life behavior changes will automatically follow.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:51 Yeah, you r- you really, you, you really got me thinking about language actually, because two terms that I use very commonly in my work, whether it's hypertension or lifestyle, you've, you've just, you know, in seconds-

Dr. Gabor Maté 46:04 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:04 ... reframed what those words actually mean. Uh, and I wonder where that comes from. You know, you're an immigrant to North America. Where has this fascination with language come from?

Dr. Gabor Maté 46:14 Well, I, I think as an immigrant, you get to see the language a bit more clearly than the people-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:19 Yeah. [laughs] That's true

Dr. Gabor Maté 46:19 ... who are, who are actually in it, and you get to see the construction of language. And, and by the way, in, in my secret life, I used to be an English teacher, so I, I, I did that with- before I went to medical school. So I've always paid a lot of attention to language, and language very often unconsciously expresses realities and truths that when you pay attention to it are, are revealing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:40 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 46:40 And, uh, so words should never... Even the word addict. The word addiction actually comes from a Latin phrase for slavery.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:48 Wow.

Dr. Gabor Maté 46:48 S- so, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:51 Slave to the pain.

Dr. Gabor Maté 46:53 Well, uh-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:53 Or the-

Dr. Gabor Maté 46:53 ... the original meaning was an addictus, it, it, it, it comes from the word to assign. Now, in, in, in, in, in the Roman world, when you couldn't pay a debt, you would be assigned as a slave to somebody until you worked off the debt. So you'd be an addictus, somebody who was assigned to somebody. So that's the origin of the word. So, so it implies slavery. So we actually understand that that addict refers or originates in a word for slavery. We realize that it's not a choice, 'cause who would, uh, who would ever choose to be a slave, you know? So I think language is absolutely revelatory if you understand the sources and meanings of words.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:34 Yeah. Yeah, very much so. Gabor, I wanna go to, um, something you, you did last night in, in your talk, which-

Dr. Gabor Maté 47:44 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:44 ... you know, I went out for dinner with my friends afterwards. We all attended it, and we were all talking about it.

Dr. Gabor Maté 47:48 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:49 Um, which was you, you, you peppered throughout the evening, you said, "I- if there was anyone in here who feels they have some form of addiction-

Dr. Gabor Maté 47:59 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:59 ... without childhood trauma-

Dr. Gabor Maté 48:01 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:01 ... and you're happy to talk about it, please raise your hand." And, um, you know, at the end, you, you actually found someone who, you know, quite confidently, uh, put their hand up and was, you know, pretty nonchalant that they had a, you know-

Dr. Gabor Maté 48:13 Happy childhood

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:13 ... happy childhood.

Dr. Gabor Maté 48:14 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:14 And so you started, uh, inquiring into her childhood. And I remember the tone of her voice, and she was very much, you said, you know, "You have a happy childhood?" "Yes, happy childhood." Parents said, "Yeah, parents absolutely loved me." You know, really sort of very vocal about how great her childhood was, and then it wasn't long before it became clear that actually- She felt that her parents really loved each other and sometimes she was intruding on them.

Dr. Gabor Maté 48:39 That's right.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:39 And I think it was really powerful for the whole audience of 300 to see how, you know, how we all potentially tell ourselves a certain narrative, stories that we continue telling ourselves. And, you know, she obviously maybe is a fan of your work. She's come here. She, she's come to watch you speak, but hadn't reflected on her own experience. And, and I, I wonder, you know, what's going on there?

Dr. Gabor Maté 49:10 So what's happened here is that this woman says she had this happy childhood, but within a couple of minutes... And, and, you know, my mantra is why, not why the addiction, but why the pain? And so the, I, I always say that there's pain underneath it. And I said to the audience, "It never takes me more than three minutes to drill down to where the pain is. You just have to ask the right questions." So this should-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:29 And I've gotta say, about a minute in-

Dr. Gabor Maté 49:30 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:30 ... I thought maybe this is the first one who Gabor won't get to.

Dr. Gabor Maté 49:33 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:33 You know? I, I actually thought it, 'cause she was so confident in her answer.

Dr. Gabor Maté 49:36 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:36 So anyway, please continue.

Dr. Gabor Maté 49:37 Well, well, that confidence itself is a giveaway.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:39 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 49:40 Because it's an assumed stance to protect herself from the pain that she doesn't want to feel or she's afraid to feel. So she said, "Well, maybe I felt I was intruding on my parents." And in other words, really what she felt was that she wasn't accepted and loved for who she was. And, and when she felt unhappy, there was nobody for her to be talk to, to talk to. And all you have to do is ask that person, "If your own child did the same thing, how would you understand it?" And they totally get it. So w- what's going on there, she's not lying.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:08 No.

Dr. Gabor Maté 50:08 But believing that she had a happy childhood was her way of dealing with her pain. Because if she dropped that idea, she'd have to realize that she suffered and she actually, as much as her parents did their best and loved her, we're not blaming the parents, but she herself got the impression that she was alone and unsupported and unloved for who she was. Now, that's very painful.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:29 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 50:29 So we defend against the pain by suppressing those emotions and developing this, this ideology of the happy childhood. And so that's just another form of self-defense. And then given her ideology that she had a happy childhood, she can't understand why she turned to an addiction. But once she gets that, "Yeah, okay, that belief that I was happy denies the fact that I was feeling isolated and alone, and I felt myself as an exc- as an intrusion on my parents."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:03 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 51:03 Now she can understand what her pain was. But, but not feeling that pain was how she survived her childhood. Because as a child, how would she survive if she believed that she wasn't loved for who she was? Life would be intolerable for her, so she has to deny and suppress that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:20 So she had an appropriate response to-

Dr. Gabor Maté 51:22 Well, the s-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:22 ... the signals that were given to her.

Dr. Gabor Maté 51:24 That's exactly what you said before, and that's exactly what happened with her.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:27 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 51:27 So that, that suppression of her pain and denial of it is a completely appropriate defensive response.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:33 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 51:33 These are not mistakes that we make. These are, these are essential survival adaptations. The problem is then we spend the whole... Because we learned how to ignore our feelings as children, now we learn to ignore them for the rest of our lives, and that then creates problems for us. So again, it's that whole idea of an early adaptation, essential adaptation, brilliant adaptation, but because it's unconscious, it stays with us, and now it limits our lives. So we become imprisoned with our own adaptations. Our, our, our, our childhood patterns become the prison through which we live our lives.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:12 So hopefully last night for her might have been a, a key step potentially in her now being able to really go out and seek real healing, transformative healing. Uh, hopefully. Touch wood. Um-

Dr. Gabor Maté 52:25 Touch wood. But I would say that the very fact that she came to the talk and the very fact that she raised her hand, she was already working at it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:33 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 52:33 Because she didn't have to raise her hand.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:35 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 52:36 So if she did, it meant that she already had a curiosity about it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:40 Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Gabor Maté 52:40 So she'd, so she'd already taken the first step.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:42 Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:44 Okay. Well, in your, in your book, uh, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, I think is it the second chapter where you talk about, um, a funeral you go to-

Dr. Gabor Maté 52:52 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:52 ... of one of your, uh, someone you were looking after, an, an addict. And-

Dr. Gabor Maté 52:56 A thir- a 35-year-old who overdosed, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:58 And, uh, I will let you tell the story, but-

Dr. Gabor Maté 53:00 [clears throat]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:02 ... um, one thing it really illustrates to me is how, how, you know, addiction is on a, on a, is on a spectrum, of course, but how powerful that addictive, that, that addictive drive is for some people. And, and, and I just wonder if you could expand on that, 'cause I, that was really, really interesting.

Dr. Gabor Maté 53:20 So this woman's real name was Shannon, which I can tell now, and she was 35. And she was a beautiful woman as a young woman. Uh, when I met her, she was already fading. She was in her mid-30s or early 30s when I met her. Um, she had, uh, a severe, uh, opiate addiction. And because she injected, she had, um, bloodborne infection in her, one of her knees, so she had osteomyelitis, uh, a joint infection, um, or a bone infection in her knee bones. She needed to be hospitalized for intravenous antibiotic care, but she could never be hospitalized long enough 'cause she had to leave and use. And every time she left and used, she was, uh, expelled from the hospital.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:07 Ah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 54:07 So her osteomyelitis was never treated.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:09 Expelled from the hospital?

Dr. Gabor Maté 54:10 E- expelled from the hospital because she-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:12 She wasn't engaging in treatments?

Dr. Gabor Maté 54:13 Well, she was leaving the hospital to use.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:16 Right.

Dr. Gabor Maté 54:16 And, uh-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:17 So therefore they wouldn't treat her?

Dr. Gabor Maté 54:18 So the... Yeah. So she wouldn't, the, the, the, so they, they didn't want her using her IV lines for shooting o-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:24 Sure

Dr. Gabor Maté 54:24 ... heroin. Now, now since then we've developed a facility where people can have intravenous antibiotics and use if they need to, but this is before the days of that particular facility.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:35 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 54:35 So out of the regular hospitals, she'd be regularly kicked out before her six or eight weeks of antibiotics treatment was completed. So by the mid-30s, a- and they were actually talking about amputating the knee 'cause there's nothing more they could do. And so by her mid-30s she was in a wheelchair, and she would quickly wheel her wheelchair down a street looking for her next hit. Now she left the Downtown Eastside for six months, and she actually got clean. And, um, then she came back, and within three days was dead, dead of an overdose. Because what happened, of course, is that she used the same amount she had left be- she had used before she left the Downtown Eastside, but now she was detoxed, so she'd lost her tolerance. You would understand-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:21 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 55:21 ... what I mean by that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:22 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 55:22 So the same dose that she could tolerate prior to leaving the Downtown Eastside, now that she was free of drugs, that same dose killed her.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:30 Wow.

Dr. Gabor Maté 55:30 And so she, we, so we went to her funeral, and there's all these friends of hers, each of them with their HIV or their hepatitis C or their chronic infections. And they're, uh, mourning their friend.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:43 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 55:44 And I'm thinking how powerful the drive of the addiction is that this young woman would, would, would, would shed her life for the sake of that next hit. And her friends, who are watching her being buried and memorialized, are gonna continue using despite this dire example.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:01 Yeah, they're gonna continue using despite seeing that that-

Dr. Gabor Maté 56:04 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:04 ... just seeing that wasn't enough to go, "Right, we're gonna change-"

Dr. Gabor Maté 56:07 No

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:07 ... "our behavior now."

Dr. Gabor Maté 56:08 And which is why anybody who thinks this is a choice is out of their minds. Nobody would choose to, to, to blight and endanger their lives like that. And, and-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:20 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 56:20 ... so this is what made me thinking, "Well, what is this powerful drive?" I mean, it must be really deeply built in to the human brain and the human soul for people to engage in this behavior despite all this, um, um, deterrence-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:36 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 56:37 ... that they witness around them. And so what made that event powerful for me was the starkness of the experience of these people, and the social idea that somehow this is any kind of a choice.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:52 Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's incredible to hear that, actually. And certainly me and, uh, and maybe, maybe all the listeners, um, on some level in their lives may know, n- maybe not to the same degree as that, but may know what that drive feels like when you, when you know you shouldn't be doing something but you choose to do it nonetheless.

Dr. Gabor Maté 57:13 Well, I know that. I mean, I know. I've had that in my own life, and, and there's something in you that knows you shouldn't be doing it. It's almost... Recently I, I, I became aware of a form of therapy called internal family systems.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:27 Oh my God, that's what I'm doing at the moment. [laughs]

Dr. Gabor Maté 57:28 IFS.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:29 Yeah. It's incredible.

Dr. Gabor Maté 57:30 Dick Schwartz's stuff. Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:32 Yeah. I've had a, two or three sessions, and it's, it's been brilliant for me so far.

Dr. Gabor Maté 57:35 Amazing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:36 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 57:37 So I, I met the founder of it recently. We've become good friends and, uh, but, but I've learned the technique to some degree. I'm, I'm not an official practitioner of it, but I, I'm quick to catch on. So in internal family systems, you realize there's these different parts of you, and these different parts form like a, a, a squabbling family. Some of them like each other, some of them don't like each other. So there's a part of me that can watch the other part doing its thing, knowing that he shouldn't be doing it, but feels quite helpless to intervene. So I watch myself... Like, for example, when I am supposed to be working, looking after clients, but instead I watch myself go to the store to engage in my shopping addiction. I'm not unaware of what's happening. There's a part of me that's watching it, disapproving of it, wanting me not to do it, but that part is not strong enough to assert itself. The part that's driving the behavior is leading, is driving the boat.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:36 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 58:37 And, uh, so it, it, it's a question of becoming friendly with all these parts, finding out what is it that they really want. What are they after? Now the part that's driving me to do the shopping when I should be looking after my patients-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:54 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 58:54 ... is a part that really is desperate for, for me to, desperate for me to feel good for a moment. That's all it wants. It just wants me to be happy. It's not an evil part. It just wants me to be happy. And, and it's not a question of indulging it, but it's a question of really getting to know it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:12 And understanding it.

Dr. Gabor Maté 59:13 Understanding it and actually being compassionate with it, and, and then teaching it, "You know what? It's okay, but this guy can be happy without indulging in that behavior."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:25 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 59:25 "He doesn't need to do that. You may think he does, but he doesn't."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:28 I, I think compassion is, um, something that's coming up quite a lot, isn't it? As, as a society, how do we deal with addiction, no matter what it is? Instead of locking people up-

Dr. Gabor Maté 59:38 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:38 ... because we deem them to have a illegal addiction-

Dr. Gabor Maté 59:41 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:41 ... we should be treating them with compassion. But we should also be treating ourselves with compassion, I think, and not beating ourselves up over the choices we make, because often, you know, they're just a protective mechanism. Um-

Dr. Gabor Maté 59:55 Yeah. Well, so you, you mentioned a number of times the, um, the question of the arbitrariness of the, um, which drugs we choose to illegalize. As physicians, tell me if you disagree with me, but give me 1,000 people who smoke heavily every day, pack a day, give me another 1,000 who drink heavily every day, give me 1,000 who smoke cannabis every day, and give me s- 1,000 who shoot heroin four times a day in a dose that doesn't create an overdose. At the end of 30 years, in which groups are we gonna see more disease and death amongst those four groups?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:38 Alcohol, probably.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:00:39 Alcohol and, uh, and the smoking, the cigarette smoking.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:41 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:00:41 By far. By far. These are far more lethal drugs than the heroin and the cannabis

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:47 But they're okay, aren't they? They're, they're, they're legal.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:00:50 Yeah, no, the, the heroin, it's true, if you overdose, it'll kill you. But I'm talking about in doses

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:55 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:00:55 A part of many of the overdoses happen because people are having to shoot up in back alleys with who know what impurities. What if we gave them their heroin in, in, as they do in some clinics in the UK, at least they used to, in, in, in prescribed doses that keeps them from going into withdrawal-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:11 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:01:11 ... um, but doesn't overdose them. That group will be far healthier 30 years later. So by what arbitrary standard have we decided that it's okay for the people, for, for people to murder themselves with cigarettes and alcohol, but they can't use heroin legally? What logic is behind that? It has nothing to do with medicine, for sure. It has nothing to do with health.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:35 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:01:35 And I'm not saying we should sell heroin in the streets. I'm talking about the legalization and the criminalization and the, uh, ostracization. Why is that drug addict more to be, more reprehensible than the person who smokes cigarettes? W- w- where do we get these ideas from?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:53 It's the why, not the what.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:01:54 That's right.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:55 You know, it's-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:01:55 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:55 ... an- and really, I mean, we, we were talking about this before, before we started recording, but, you know, we're both, um, on one level, we are both just GPs. We're just-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:06 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:06 ... family physicians. Um, and-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:08 Well, well, the word just has another meaning

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:11 Of... What, what does it mean?

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:14 We're very just people. We're very, we're interested in justice. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:18 Yeah, I like it, I like it. But what, what, what I find really interesting, and it's something I talk about quite a lot, is I, I think we've certainly overvalued the specialist within medicine-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:28 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:28 ... for far too long.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:30 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:30 And really undervalued the role of the generalist, and I am very proud to be an expert generalist.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:36 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:36 And one of the reasons I moved from specialism into general practice, which, you know, wa- was a rather, uh, unusual decision for, for many, and certainly, and, and my father, he was an immigrant to the UK, and, you know, was, was really shocked as to why his son would do that, qualify as a specialist and then [laughs] move to generalism. It-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:54 And, and it was a demotion in his mind

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:57 Yeah, I think he was just confused.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:02:58 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:59 And I understand that, you know.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:03:01 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:01 And I, I think, you know, I think the, the, the doctors of the future, the, the healthcare practitioners of the future who are gonna have the best outcome with their patients are the ones who are expert generalists and can see everything and, um, you know. I know we're, we're running short on time, so I, we will hopefully continue this at a- another time because there's so much to talk about. But I do find interesting that y- you're one of the world's leading voices on trauma a- a- and addiction, and you're a family practitioner.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:03:30 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:31 And a lot of what you do with your patients, you have intuitively picked up, and you've also got a skill at, you know, I think maybe the word counseling is the wrong word. You've, um, you do a lot of emotional work with your patients.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:03:45 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:46 And I'm finding the more I understand about the human body and the more I really understand what's driving my patient's behavior, I'm doing a lot of emotional work with them. And yes, of course, referring them to an appropriate practitioner where, where, you know, where it's, where it's needed, where someone's got that expertise, but that wasn't my job. I didn't train to do that. But I figured out, as someone who's really inquisitive as to how can I get my patient better-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:04:10 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:11 ... I find, well, I have to go there-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:04:13 That's right

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:13 ... because it's really important.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:04:15 Well, so I think you and I are both properly and, um, dramatically impressed by the capacities and the skills of, of our various specialist colleagues.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:28 Absolutely.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:04:29 It's amazing what they can do. So this is not without, this is without any sense of, of diminishing or devaluing their work.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:36 Of course.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:04:37 But they're trained in a certain ideology, which is purely biologically based. So they look upon the human body as a physiological entity, uh, divided into various organs and systems, and that's what they deal with. And what they're not taught is that human beings, the mind and the body, the emotions and the physiology are inseparable, scientifically inseparable, and we have the science to show the unity. They're also not taught that human beings are social creatures, so that our very physiology is shaped by our social relationships. And our very brains develop in a social context, so that whether we're talking about neurophysiology, uh, psychology, or the physiology of the body, we're talking about influences that go well beyond our genetic and physiological endowment. They're not taught that, and therefore, when they see a, a, a person, what they see is a disease in a particular organ. Whereas if you're a generalist, a properly trained, or at least a generalist who's developed a broader view, you see that human being in context. You see it in a relationship to their lives, in a relationship to their, to their environment, and y- you see that the illness, whether it's addiction or depression or anxiety or, for that matter, rheumatoid arthritis or scleroderma or anything else, is a manifestation not just of a system, but of an entire life. And that life is lived in a context, and we have to address that if we're gonna deal with the illness. And unfortunately, both you and I have had the experience of having to come to that conclusion through our own work and through our own internal experience-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:16 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:06:16 ... of dissatisfaction with our, how our lives are going, but nobody taught this to us.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:21 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:06:22 And, and, and, and yet this is the way that the ought to... So the average medical student, despite all the trauma that you and I have discussed today, particularly in relationship to addiction, and all the research showing, uh, how the addicted brain develops in response to the environment and how the addiction itself is a response to the environment, the average medical student in North America, and I would argue probably in Britain, doesn't even hear the word trauma once in four years of medical school. I mean, did you hear the word trauma when you went to school?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:49 I, I don't, I, I don't think I heard it till a few years ago, frankly.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:06:52 Yeah. And the-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:52 You know, let alone at medical school

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:06:54 ... and, and, and it's not sh- it's not a word that they should hear. It's a course they should have. They should, every physician should be deeply trained in trauma because everything they see, virtually everything they see has got a traumatic, um, uh, connection to it, particularly in the mental health field. But I would say in the physical health field as well. They don't even hear the word.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:14 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:07:14 And so essentially when a person goes to a physician, they go to somebody with very deep but very limited knowledge who does not see the whole individual, who's not trained to see the whole individual.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:24 Even, even the fact that we say physical health and mental health-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:07:28 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:28 ... as two separate things is almost a reflection of that in many ways.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:07:31 That's right.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:32 You know, 'cause they're not different, are they? Whether-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:07:34 And again, the word world health is interesting 'cause what's the origin of the word health? It's wholeness.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:39 Wholeness.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:07:41 So to talk about physical health is already a contradiction.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:45 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:07:45 'Cause, 'cause you can't talk about physical wholeness. Wholeness means everything.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:48 Yeah. Oh, I love it. I love it thinking about it like that. Well, Gabor, for, for many people listening, um, we- we've gone through some quite dark stuff.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:07:56 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:56 Hopefully illuminating for people, but, but potentially dark and, and quite demoralizing potentially for some people in terms of them thinking about their own lives, potentially what they might have inadvertently passed on to their own children. I know certainly the first time I saw you speak, you, you automatically start to think about your own, uh, ability as a father and what you could have potentially done better.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:08:20 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:20 All the time remembering that you've done the best that you can-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:08:23 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:23 ... at that time. Um,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:25 I wonder if we can finish off with a few notes of positivity for people that-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:08:29 Sure

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:29 ... there is hope and there are things that we can do, um, to help change this.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:08:34 Well, first of all, um, I don't see this as a gloomy discussion because I think for people to understand themselves, they need to look at all aspects of their existence. So to me, this is illuminating and, and, and St. Paul says somewhere that, uh, "Once you shed light into darkness, the darkness itself becomes light." And so that, I, I just think we have to look at all these dark places. We have to shed light onto all of them so we can fully understand ourselves. To me, that's a positive. I'm always delighted to find out something about myself that-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:04 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:09:04 ... that may have, maybe I haven't seen, seen so clearly before. I always find it liberating, and I believe people do as well, number one. Number two, what we haven't said though, and I think prob- bu- probably both you and I would agree, is that human beings have a tremendous healing capacity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:19 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:09:19 And, and, and one of the failures of modern medical training is that we put all the expertise and the hope for help into the hands of the physician. The physician is the one who's gonna deliver the cure. But we don't teach people about the innate healing capacity of the human being, and we don't learn how do you promote that healing capacity. We may have to administer whatever treatments are appropriate and whatever genius treatments we have developed.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:45 Sure.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:09:46 That's great. But nevertheless, that s- person still has an innate healing capacity. How do we engage it? How do we evoke it? How do we encourage it? That's not a question that, uh, we ask ourselves, and yet there's many examples of people healing or doing much better with illnesses than medical prognosis would have told them. Now, look at the recent case of the recent death of Stephen Hawking, the physicist, uh, who I discuss in one of my books. Now, he was given two years to live when he was 20 years old. He outlived his diagnosis by more than five decades. Something in him allowed him to do that, something in him that the medical mind could not have fathomed at the time. So there's much more to people than we realize, and so we have a lot, we have to have a lot more faith and a lot more curiosity. What is, but what is it in people that allows them to overcome the challenge of addiction? What is it that helps them, uh, uh, live much longer than we have predicted? What is healing? What is whole- becoming whole really all about? These are the questions that medicine ought to engage with, but unfortunately it does not. So I, I think your work and, and, and your podcast and your books are, if, if, if as I understand them, and the same thing with me, are designed to help people find within themselves that which can, uh, empower them to support their own healing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:03 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:11:04 And we can't say that strongly enough.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:06 Yeah, absolutely. No, thanks for that, Gabor. Um, for people who are listening who, you know, maybe, maybe something you've said has really deeply struck a chord with them about their own life, and they want to go on that journey but don't know how-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:11:23 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:24 ... have you got any words of advice as to how they can start, you know... Even, even listening to this and start to be aware, of course, is a very critical first step.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:11:32 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:32 But, um, you know, where can they go next?

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:11:35 Well, so you and I are both authors, and I would highly recommend they check out our books first because I, I think, and, and in my case, I hope they check out my books because-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:44 Of course

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:11:44 ... there's a lot of what I know and what I've learned that I've poured into my books, and a lot of people find a lot of self-knowledge just by seeing the mirror that's held up in-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:55 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:11:55 ... in my writings or in my multiple You Tube talks, for example. Now, where to go in their own lives, I actually think that once people start asking these questions, they find the answers in their own lives. In other words, um, there's an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And, a- and, and I think there's many modalities of healing that are practiced here in Britain or anywhere else in the world that once you start seeing the limitations, without rejecting the value, but seeing at the same time the limitations of, of, of mainstream medicine, start looking outside it a little bit or start finding practitioners within mainstream medicine that have a broader view. In other words, go where the help is, and don't assume that because somebody's got a degree after their name that they know everything that needs to be known. In other words, become the, become the agent in your own healing. Once people take that on, generally they find help.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:50 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:12:50 I find. I, I can't give them a specific go-to except that once you start asking the right questions, the answers will start coming.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:57 Yeah. I, I love the way you put that. So, and, and as I always say on this podcast, I-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:13:01 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:01 ... I want to empower and inspire people to become the architects of their own health.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:13:06 Exactly.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:06 Um, and I think that's really, really important, uh, particularly what you said about don't just assume because someone's got a qualification or a series of letters after their name that actually they're gonna be the right ones to help you. Um, yeah. [sighs] I, I mean, so much more I want to talk about, but I think, um, in the interest of time we're gonna have to stop it there today.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:13:26 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:27 Um, I've gotta say, Gabor, I think your work is phenomenal. I really genuinely do. I think it's got huge potential to help, uh, I was gonna say thousands, but really millions of people, uh, around the globe. I think this book, um, you know, that, that has been released in the UK, which has obviously been a, a huge bestseller for about, what, 10 years now, something like that?

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:13:45 Well, you said all over the world. In fact, it's been published only in North America.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:49 Really?

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:13:49 S- s- some of my books, like When the Body Says No, has appeared in 25 languages.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:53 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:13:53 But this one has been published only in North America and my home country of Hung- Hungary.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:58 Right.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:13:58 But wherever it is published, it is a bestseller, and, uh, I know tens of thousands of people more have been helped by them. I get that feedback, so.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:07 And e- even that introduction you've written for the UK edition-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:14:09 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:10 ... is, you know, I couldn't put it down actually.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:14:12 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:12 And, and it was just amazing to really capture the essence of it and the lives that you have changed from people who, who've just actually able to reflect on their own lives just from reading-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:14:24 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:24 ... the book. So I, I really would highly recommend that people buy the book, and actually, uh, I think it's gonna help, uh, your own life. It might even help someone close to you. Um, Gabor, where can people find you? Apart from your books, is there somewhere they can follow you online?

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:14:37 So I have a website, Dr. Gabor Maté, uh, where all my public speaking engagements, many of my articles, YouTube lectures are available, chapters of my books are downloadable. No cost to any of that. There's no cost to anything. Um, uh, or they can just go on YouTube, put in my name, and I have many dozens of lectures that people have filmed and, and put on YouTube. Again, there's no cost to any of that. And I speak about addiction, child development, stress and health, um, the relationship in social factors and illness. So I'm very easy to find, uh-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:12 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:15:12 ... o- on, on social media. Um, I also have a Facebook wall, whatever that means, that-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:18 [laughs]

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:15:19 ... pe- people... I, 'cause I don't post anything, but somebody does on my behalf, that people can follow. So I'm easily identifiable and, and, um-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:26 Sure

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:15:27 ... discoverable online.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:28 And what I'll do is in the Show notes page for this episode of the podcast, which will be drchatterjee.com/gabor-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:15:34 Okay

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:35 ... G-A-B-O-R, I will link to everything that, um, Gabor and I have discussed today-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:15:39 Great

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:39 ... on the episode, and I'll dis- I'll link to your website and your various talks so to make it really easy for people to find. So-

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:15:46 Uh, so let me just say, Rangan, that, um, as you m- as you may have found yourself, in the beginning when your mind starts opening to new possibilities, it's a bit of a lonely journey-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:59 Yeah

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:15:59 ... w- within the medical field, 'cause most of your colleagues just aren't aware, they're not open to what you're talking about. So it's always such a delight to run across a colleague who quite, at all without knowing each other, we just find ourselves tilling the same soil and, and, and, and, and mining the same veins and trying to discover the same truths, which only speaks to the, the nature of truth and how it just asserts itself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:30 Yeah.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:16:30 But it's always such a pleasure to meet somebody who's done some of the same work and is looking in the same directions because both you and I, you know, as, as confident as I am in my ideas and, and you seem to be in yours, we still need validation.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:41 Yeah, sure.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:16:42 So it's of- it's, it's really wonderful to meet somebody who, who, who really is asking the same questions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:49 Gabor, I can't tell you what that means to me, uh, coming from someone like yourself. It's a huge honor for me to, to be here today and talk to you, and, uh, I look forward to the next time. Thank you.

Dr. Gabor Maté 1:16:57 Likewise. Thank you.