Gabor Maté: Pain as the Root of Addiction

[Music] Read some stats to you. There will be 47 new addicts in this room out of the 331 that are here now. That statistic comes from a 2017 US Surgeon General's report. That one out of seven Americans now face substance addiction. That's not counting the ones who are already an addict, like myself. The financial cost is also astounding. It costs our economy over seven hundred forty billion a year.

How many of you know someone who has an addiction? Raise your hand. Okay, look around the room. Keep your hands up. That's, that's a lot. I mean, more than half the room, at least. Now, I'm not gonna ask you how many of you have an addiction, although many people come up to me and say, "I'm in recovery." So, this is why I want you two to meet and hear what Dr. Gabor Maté has to say. And we're gonna do, I'm gonna ask him a few questions, and then I'm gonna open it up for some of you to ask questions.

Gabor Maté was born in Hungary and survived the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis. He and his family then immigrated to Canada in 1956, where he has specialized in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, as well as a study and treatment of addictions and many different diseases and illnesses. Gabor Maté's books and articles are considered some of the best ever written in the area of addiction. And you, you know, you got to read everything that you'll see. This one, I think, when you hear me talk to him, you'll see how bright he is. Even if you have no personal connection to addiction, you certainly have a financial connection. And based on this statistic that I gave you, there's a very good chance, one in seven, that someone in your immediate family will struggle with addiction in the near future. So, you need to know the best sources and how to think about this to make good decisions.

Now, this is something I'm reading here, just to give some context. However, I think addiction is one of the most misunderstood, mislabeled. We currently penalize, and you can't punish the pain out of people. And there's many people in the room here that have behavioral addictions, which this doesn't even address. And so, I'm going to ask, I'm gonna ask Gabor about this and several other subjects. And so, please welcome my good friend, Dr. Gabor Maté. Thanks, sir.

Okay, can I make something clear, by the way? Yes. I just need to correct a couple of things. I didn't specialize in neurology and psychology, psychiatry. I wouldn't know very much if I did. I was a family physician, worked in addictions and all kinds of other fields. But that, that bio seems to be taken out of Wikipedia and I don't know, put it on there. But second thing is, I'm not doing burpees. Do some burpees. Three months ago, I decided to do thirty-six thousand five hundred push-ups a year. That's 100 a day. And as a result, on December the 4th, where my speaking events are over for the year, I'll be having a hernia surgery. So, I know burpees.

All right. Well, first off, it's, it's great to have you here. And like I'd mentioned, you weren't in the room when I first said it. This is the first time I've ever brought someone like you and talked about this subject at a business conference like this. And the reason I did it is because some people may not see the relevancy. But I want us to be able to describe to them what it is. And there's much that I can ask you about. I do want to talk about, let's show them their relevancy. Okay, what is addiction? Let's write. So, addiction is complex, but it's manifested in any behavior, any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in, and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long term and can't give up.

Now, notice any behavior. I didn't say drugs. Most of the time, when we think about addiction, you think of substances. And that certainly is one important target of addictive behavior. But I said, any behavior that could be gambling, could be sex, could be relationships, could be internet, could be Facebook, could be shopping, as in my case, could be eating, could be work. Any behavior that you gives you temporary relief, pleasure, but so you suffer negative consequences, you don't give up. That's an addiction. And let me ask you this question. I'll go into that definition. How many people here will acknowledge that sometime or another in your lives, you've had some kind of an addiction? Sometime. Okay, that's how relevant it is.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And if I'm going with that stream, let me also ask you guys another question for which I'll ask some of you to just put your hand up and shout out your answers. I'm gonna ask you not what you're addicted to, or when, or follow along. I'm just gonna ask you, what did you like about it? What did it do for you? What did it give you in a short term? So, who would tell me? Relief from. Relief from pain. Thank you. Anybody else? Sorry. Okay. Control. Control. Gave you the relief from pain, gave you control. What else? Love. Then, escape from anxiety. Thank you. What else? Was that loneliness? It dealt with loneliness. Okay. Let's look at these things now. Escape from pain, pain relief, sense of control, relief from loneliness. What else do people say? Oh, is that really for anxiety? In other words, inner peace. So, right away, when you understand that, you get that the addiction wasn't to a problem. Your addiction was your attempt to solve the problem. And the real question is, how did that problem develop? How come it's seven billion humans in the world, you felt lonely? How come you lack the sense of agency, control, authority in your life? Why were you in so much emotional pain? And everything you've said, the loneliness, the lack of power, love, control, the anxiety, these are forms of emotional pain. So, my mentor around addiction is not, "Why the addiction?" but "Why the pain?" And this is where we can talk more about it. But as you and I both know, the, the current model of addiction is either the legal one, which says it's a choice that people make, and therefore we have to punish them for it, or it's the medical one, in which case it's an inherited brain disease. But it isn't indeed those things. Where it actually is, is an attempt to solve a human life problem, a lot of emotional pain, loneliness, distress, anxiety, whatever it is. And the real question then is, what happened in my life, or your life, Joe, or everybody else's lives here, that we incurred pain? And then, how do we deal with our pain? Because the addiction itself magnifies the pain, it multiplies it, it, it increases it exponentially. So, it begins in pain. As, as Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, says, addictions begin in pain, and they end in pain.

Yeah. Well, it was on this stage last year that actually, for the first time publicly, told about not only my drug addiction, which I, you know, for several years ago, the first time I started talking about. And then drug addict. And what was that? Cocaine? Was it? It was cocaine. Yeah. Well, I mean, when I was between the ages of 16 and 18, it started with, I would get high every day and smoke pot. I would take pills, speed. I would snort crystal meth. I would snort cocaine. And there was one day I remember where I, when one day I was freebasing, I was on LSD, I was smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, taking mushrooms, and snorting crystal meth, all in one day. And, okay, I mean, like, I was in bad shape in youth.

Now, Gabor, when I was in Vancouver, you toured me around. Were you actually in Vancouver's East Side? Because I treated some of the worst addicts on Vancouver's East Side for many years. And during that time, you know, I did a lot of drugs. Then I got, I moved away from the environment, started exercising, ended up getting a job in a mental hospital as a mental health tech. And I would take the patients that were there for addiction to AA, I would drive them to AA meetings. And any meetings. And I would sit in on those meetings, never realizing later in life how much relevance it had. But the core addiction was a sexual addiction because I was molested as a kid. My mother died when I was four. And I was molested as a kid. I wasn't paid money not to say anything between the ages of 8 to 10. And it wired in my head that sex is not an intimate act of love and oneness. It's something you get off. If they find interrupts. There was something else here too. So I'll talk about myself and I'll talk about you. One of my addictions has been to work. In fact, that's a continued challenge for me. If you look at my travel schedule. And so, I got a certain message from the world. I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1944. Jewish parents, two months before the Nazis occupied Hungary. So, I spent the first year of my life with my mother under Nazi rule, who, and she was in terror the whole year, as you can imagine. Parents killed in Auschwitz and so on. My father was away in forced labor. The message I got from the world is that the world is warming, not because Hitler didn't want me, because I didn't know Hitler, but my mother was unhappy. And children are narcissists in the developmental sense, they take everything personally. So, when the bad things are happening, it must be about me. And if she's not happier on me, dick, not on the spiritual teacher, says that the greatest gift parents can give their children is their own happiness, because the children take that personally. It's about us. We must be great creatures. So, when my mother is unhappy and depressed and in terror, I get the message, the world doesn't want me. And then I want your vage to give you to a stranger to save my life. So, I don't see her for a month. I get the message, there wasn't mommy. Now, then in Canada, 30 years later, 30 odd years later, I become a physician. But one way to deal with not being wanted is to become a doctor. It was not yet neither. I don't want you all the time. They're gonna want you when they're being born. They want you when they're dying. And they're gonna launch ready baby, every point in between. And the beepers always going. This is before cell phones, of course. And the beeper is always going. And you're getting validation every moment. And what it is, is a compensation for the sense of not being wanted that I've never dealt with. Now, in your case, you got a message as well that you're wanted through your body. You're wanted to your body. You, by you're wanted when you're sexually available. That's the message you get. What are you gonna do? So, especially if you look at men who are sex addicts, and women who are sex addicts, there's no such thing as a monster with a nympho, a nymphomaniac. That's just a slander. But it really is, is women or sometimes men who have learned that only through their bodies and only through the sexual act, or they actually wanted. Well, that's really addictive because we all need to be wanted. Yeah. And that's, I think that's also what's behind it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, and I lived with so much shame. Even though I started making money, I always had that, that deep shame and that secret life. And I just struggled. You know, the thing that became more apparent to me was I was in a, you know, I became financially capable of joining like a high-profile group. And I joined a high-profile group for people that were struggling with sexual addictions. And in that room were billionaires, famous athletes, politicians, Academy Award-winning actors and actresses, you know, men and women. And I saw people that the world admired in their most broken states. And I realized, wow, you know, that whole saying that which is most private is most public. That so many people struggle with this. And that's why I've now wanted to use the platform that I have in business to go out and try to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment. And right now, the criminal justice system is treating addicts when it needs to be something else.

Well, if you'll, if you look at the criminal justice system, it's really based on this idea that, as I said earlier, that addiction is a choice that somebody makes. If somebody's not making a conscious choice, what I'm doing, punishing them? You don't punish people because they're suffering and they're trying to escape from their pain. You help them, right? Instead of making them criminals. And number one, number two, it's very arbitrary as to what we decide is should be legal or illegal. Because give me a thousand heroin addicts who inject four times a day in a quantity that does not lead to an overdose, and give me a thousand people who smoke a pack a day, and another thousand who drink heavily. Guess which thousand is gonna be the healthiest and longest living at the end of 30 years? By far, their own group. By far. And I'm talking medical facts here. So, by some, I'm not saying that the heroin should be legalized and sold in corner stores like cigarettes, but I am saying that the decision to criminalize it is totally arbitrary and there's nothing to do with either science or logic or humanity. Right. I mean, you know, you cannot punish pain out of people. And I mean, I have some stats here that I've heard you say that, you know, every month, 911 happens. Actually, according to the President's Commission on Addiction on the opioid crisis. And by the way, even when we talk about the opioid crisis, it's a rather arbitrary determination, not because it isn't a crisis. I mean, it is. According to the president's own advisory commission, every three weeks, you have a 911 happen in the United States as a result of illegal drug overdoses. We're just talking drugs. We are talking all the other religious talk and illegal drugs. I'm never talking alcohol or cigarettes or everything else. We're just talking overdoses. And and and now it's hitting the white middle class. It's actually helping to lower the life expectancy of the white middle class male for the first time in a long time. But it's been hitting our aboriginal population for a long time. It's been happening there for decades. If you vote on the Native reservations in Canada or the US, suicides, overdoses, they've been happening in epidemic proportions for decades. We just don't think that's so important. Now that it's happening to us, or the people that we care about, now it's a crisis. And then if you ask the question, well, why is it that the Aboriginal population has got this tremendous rate of of addiction? And again, that's a very distinct question because this whole idea that addiction is a genetic disease flies out the window when you look at the Aboriginal experience. Because the Aboriginals in North America had access to potentially addictive substances long before Caucasians came here. They had access to tobacco, they had access to alcohol in New Mexico, they had access to sacred substances like peyote. And they even knew these substances, haven't even used them. But how did they use them? They used them ceremonially, not to obtain and diminish their consciousness, but to raise their consciousness. They used it to connect spiritually with creation. They used it to create community and in contact and culture. The addictive use is just the opposite. The other use is to escape from pain, and it's alone, and it's not communal. If the problem was genetic, why weren't they addicted before? The reason that they did knowledge because of the severe trauma that they've suffered over hundreds of years, their near extermination. And I don't have to give you all the details, I'm sure you know it all. Same thing in Canada. So, what I'm saying with addiction, in short, is that every case of addiction originates in trauma. And that trauma could be overt, like in the case of the Aboriginal population, the children in Canada being taken away from them, sent to residential schools for 100 years, where they were sexually abused and beaten up, and their culture and their language was denied. In British Columbia, in 1960, I know a woman who was four years old in 1965 in my province of British Columbia, who, at four years old, was taken to the residential school where she spoke her tribal language. And the punishment was that they snuck up in an airtime for a whole hour, a four-year-old. And then she sits there for an hour and she can't put a ten in her mouth because it'll cut her lips. And then the sexual abuse began. So, then when I look at Vancouver's Downtown East Side, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use, we have more drug addicts there in a few square miles radius than anywhere on the continent. It's a shock to people even come from Detroit and New York to Vancouver. 30% of our clients are First Nations or Aboriginal people. They make up 4% of the population. Why? Because of the severe trauma that they've experienced. And and and this is the one piece, the trauma piece, that you and I are so aware of. What that addictions, I was talking to a colleague of mine, Jamie. Where are you, Jamie? You hear someone new? She's a physician from Detroit. Oh, Dr. Jamie, help you in the room? Oh, she's, I think she's in the genius lounge. Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. So, she works in the emergency ward at a Detroit hospital. And she graduated in '05 for medical school in Michigan. And after her lectures on the emotional trauma did you receive? Not a single one. Honey, lectures on how the human brain develops in interaction with their arm and with the environment. Did you receive not one? Which is the same with me when I went to medical school four years ago. And so, what I'm saying is that the, the medical world are totally misunderstands the problem and don't get any training in understanding human psychology. And the same thing is true of many of the programs where people go for addiction. So, they never deal with the core issue. They only deal with the, the behavior of addiction. But the behavior is only a symptom.

Yeah. Well, let's get it. I want to touch on ADHD because, right, I have been diagnosed with ADHD. You have. How many people in the room would admit or think they have ADHD? Right. And I've heard you, I mean, you talked about in your book, Scattered, that ADHD is a response to trauma. Yes, it is. What does that mean?

Well, first of all, let me, let me make a point that occurred to me when you're talking about your marijuana use and your cocaine use. Those are typical self-medications for ADHD because the marijuana calms down the hyperactive mind. And if you get treated for ADHD, what do they give you? They give you a stimulant, which elevates dopamine levels in the brain. What do you think cocaine is? It's a stimulant. It elevates dopamine levels. So, the point I'm making is that a lot of addictions are actually self-medications for specific conditions, like in your case. Now, ADHD. Everybody, again, the medical man turned ADHD. And I was diagnosed in my 50s. And to my children were diagnosed afterwards. Not the medical mantra is that it's a genetic brain disease. Well, it isn't genetic, and it's not a brain disease. When you look at the tuning of the absent-mindedness of ADHD, why do we have that capacity to tune out? Do you think nature gives us that capacity? We all have the capacity to dissociate, to tune out. Why? Well, it's very simple. If I were to threaten you right now, stress you, abuse you verbally, you would, the number of options available to you. One would be to get up and leave, which is called flight. Or you could stand up and assert yourself and tell me to stop, which is called fight. And if you couldn't do either, given that, how many hundreds of people are here? There's about 400 between both rooms. Okay. So, if 400 people here, you could ask for help. So, those would be the functional options. But what if you couldn't escape because you're too small and powerless? What if you couldn't fight back for the same reason? And what if there's nobody to ask for help? Then what would you do? Well, you wouldn't do anything. Your brain would go into an automatic dissociative mode to protect you from the distress. So, what if this is actually an adaptation to overwhelming stress? Now, if you put me back into my first year of life, and there are times in the first year of life when every second, like in this space of time, millions, millions of connections are being made in the brain. What's happening? My first year of life, my mother is stressed. The day after the German army marches into Budapest, when I am two months of age, she calls the pediatrician to say, "Would you please come and see Gabor? Of course, he's crying all the time." And the pediatrician says, "Well, of course, they'll come and see him. But I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying now." Why choose babies? Whose babies crying? Well, not because I know anything about Hitler or genocide, but because I'm picking up on my mother's stress. There's a quote here from one of my teachers that I'd like to read, if I can find it. And it says that the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in the immediate environment. The child is aware of its own body and can also feel the tension, rigidity, and pain in the body of the mother, or anyone else he's with. If the mother's suffering, the baby suffers too. The pain never gets discharged. So, let's say, what do I do then? My mother is depressed and stressed and terrorized. How do I deal with it? Can I fight back? Escape? Ask for help? From whom? I tune out. But then the tuning out becomes programming to my brain. And then 55 years later, or 50 years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD. ADHD. Now, what I'm saying is that it, and I wasn't abused, no abuse. Me, I just had a depressed and and fearful mother. And being a very sensitive, and the more sensitive you are, the more you pick up on that. So, in those ADHD, and if you look at it, it's an adaptation. It begins an adaptation, which later on becomes a problem. So, I'm not saying it's great. I'm saying that it begins an adaptation, which then becomes a problem. That's the nature of these early adaptations which children employ, not consciously, to protect themselves from stress, actually become problems later on. Now, if you look at the question of why between 2002 and 2013, I'm being approximate here, the rate of ADHD diagnosis in American kids has gone up threefold. What's going on? What's going on is that the parenting environment is becoming increasingly stressed for all kinds of reasons. And then the parenting environment is stressed, the kids are stressed. And how do they cope with it? They tune out. When the brains are developing. Now, they're getting diagnosed and medicated. And all this mental health crisis. And we're not looking at is, what is it about the environment that actually fosters or ferments that that response in children? And I'm only talking about ADHD. We could talk about anxiety, because people who are addicted often self-medicate anxiety. They self-medicate with work, with sex, with TV, with distractions, and of course, with drugs. And the New York Times magazine two weeks ago had an article about the burgeoning rate of anxiety in American teenagers. And and and apparently, one-third now of teenagers and adults in the United States suffer from anxiety. And why? But if it was genetic, it won't be increasing, because genes don't change in a population over ten years or twenty years or even a hundred years. What's happening is that the conditions in which children are growing up is getting more and more stressful. And that has to do with the stress on the parents. And that also has to do, of course, with the workaholism of the parents, like in my case. You know, the world thought I was great. That was out there delivering babies and helping the dying, palliative care, and everything else in between. But what of me did my children receive? Not very much. Because I was always trying to validate myself, what in the world. So, that I pass on my trauma to them? But I pass it on not genetically, but through the conditions that obtained in my home. And my kids were small. Yeah.

Wow. We'll take a few questions in a moment. Because addicts, in active addiction, people lie, they cheat, they steal. Can they have symptoms that are much different than say, like, like an actual disease like cancer? And so, they cause trouble, they cause a ruckus, they're self-destructive. How does one, how do you, how do you interact with someone that's caused so much grief in your life? I mean, in my worst stages of addiction, I was a pain in the ass. And so, how does one hold compassion when there's a family member, a husband, a wife, a child, you know, friends that are just causing so much trouble? How do we take that framing? Because I'd love to have people leave here and have a whole different perspective on how to interact with addicts, how to think about it. Because through this room, we can make an incredible impact in in the field of helping people with struggling with these, with trauma.

Well, and just as you, in my case, when I was in my addictive phase, and my addiction was besides to work, it was for shopping. And I shopped compulsively for classical music. And how can I be addicted? You just love music. No, I didn't. I loved the music, yes, I'm passionate about it. But it's a shopping I was addicted to. I had to get more and more and more. And it doesn't matter how many CDs I bought, next day I have to get a whole bunch more. And and of course, in the process of spending a lot of money. And of course, the one addiction justified the other because I was thinking, I worked so hard, I deserved to give myself some pleasure. That's what clever the addicted brain is. It just, it justifies everything. And I lied to my wife, or where I was going to the store again. But it was like I was lying, having an affair. I lied and I cheated and so on. So, what do I say to families? So, there's two major things I say to families. One is, you have a decision to make. There's two rational choices and one irrational one. The rational choice is, number one, what you're doing causes me so much pain, it's so much stress, I can't be with it. I love you very much, but this is too hard on me. And I'm not willing to expend my energies trying to self-care for all the stress that's been caused for me by your behavior. So, I can't be with you. That's a perfectly rational choice. Or you can say, I love you very much, and I understand that what you're doing, whatever it is, comes out of your pain. And this is the only way so far you have found to deal with your pain. So, I'm not gonna judge you, I'm not gonna cajole you, and I'm gonna try and change you. I just hope you come to your senses at some point. But I'll be with you, and I'll be supporting you emotionally and so on. That's another rational choice. What is completely irrational and dysfunctional is to stay with somebody and try and change them, to cajole them, to convince them, to bribe them, to beg them, to to coerce them to change. That's what's crazy making. Don't ever do that. It's one or the other. That's the first thing. The second thing is, given my understanding of addiction, that it isn't an individual brain disease, but actually is a function of a child's experience, a person's experience in a family environment, and particularly in a multi-generational family environment where trauma is passed on from one generation to the next, unwittingly. But it is, I was, I did not mean to traumatize my kids, but I did. And parents do. Then we recognize that the addiction that's manifested in you didn't begin with you. It's actually an expression of multi-generational family dynamics. And so, what it actually is, is that recognition allows for an opportunity. Now, let's all heal together. So, that you say to the addict, "Thank you for being a sensitive one who's manifested for all of us what's been hidden in the family and that we haven't known how to deal with or haven't even realized it was there." And so, now it's time to hear the whole family system. And we invite you to join us if you're ready. And if you're not ready, we're still gonna carry on that path of healing for the family because it's so important. But we're not gonna judge you whether you join us or whether you don't. So, that's what I would say to families. And you know, I should mention my book, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts," and there's a chapter on families in there saying just what I said here.

Yeah. I mean, Gabor's books are amazing. I'll ask you at the end to get about websites and stuff. Evan Pagan, since you're up at the mic, if you could please.

Joe, thanks for being vulnerable. You know, you said when you were kind of under the influence of the addiction, you were a pain in the ass. But it wasn't about the addiction. Thank you. Try to be funny right now. No, one observation is this word, addiction, and the term addict. Yeah. It feels, it feels like there could be a word. You know, I'm very interested in words and symbols and, yeah, call things that could make it easier to relate to.

Well, look, the problem is with words is that they become used. Originally, they're quite accurate, but then they become pejoratives. So, you know, in psychological terms, they were like neurotic, just refer to a certain state of mind, but then it becomes the pejorative, "Don't be so neurotic." An addict actually originates from a perfectly good Latin word, "addictus," and then "victus" was a person who was assigned to somebody else as a slave because they were in debt and they couldn't pay. They said that bad. So, the word, the original of the word addiction itself originates in slavery. It's a really good word because the addict is a slave to the to the habit. And in itself, there's nothing wrong with it, except that it becomes a pejorative and a stigma, and there's so little understanding of it. So, I quite agree with you. I've said this before that if I could pass a law, I would, but every time a politician or anybody, physician, anybody talks about an addict, they would have to say, not the word addict, but they'd have to say, "a human being who suffered so much pain that didn't know how else to escape from it but through this particular behavior." Outlaw the word addict. And every time you want to say addict, you have to say what I just said. That would change the conversation. It would also be very accurate.

Yeah, it feels like what's coming to me is maybe I'm like a compulsive soother. Yeah. Or compulsive self-soother. There's something. And, yeah, that's okay. Again, you know, the problem is that it's not in the words that we use, but in how we view people. Because pretty soon, unless the view of the addict changes, then any phrase I come up with, you come up with, would also become pejoratives. So, it's the fundamental attitude that needs to shift.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. How do you, how do you treat it? Yeah. Well, what's the best? I mean, we're currently, I think we're so much as a society in the infancy stages of even beginning to really understand this as a whole. I mean, if you controlled everything, how would you treat this?

Well, take a very, well, tragically well-known case right now, Harvey Weinstein, who clearly had an addiction to sexual predation. And of course, there's all kinds of justified outrage at the system that allowed him that, that enabled him to carry on for so many decades. And people are angry with him. It's just totally understandable. But if you came to me for treatment, I would not begin with any kind of a judgment. That we did it was bad. He already knows it. I would ask him, like I asked you guys, "What did it do for you? What did you get from it that was missing from your life? And what was missing from your life? How did you lose it? What happened to you?" In other words, whatever else you do, first of all, you have to accept these people as they are, and not judge them. And understand that there were slaves to something inside them, and they didn't will in billing them. Makes them self-slaves. Number one. Number two, something happened to create that compulsion. And that something happened, that's something that happened that created the compulsion was rooted in pain. And so, in other words, you have to treat them with compassion. And you have to actually get to the core trauma, rather than just dealing with the behavior. And the problem with all the many programs, Betty Ford and elsewhere, people go to for all these high-end expensive treatments, rarely do they deal with the trauma. And even in the 12-step programs, they rarely deal with the trauma. They just, that's David Smith, was a physician in San Francisco who founded the Haight-Ashbury Clinic back in the '60s. He said to me once that the medical profession is trauma-phobic. For horses, the whole society. We're started by trauma and the manifestations of trauma which show up in a culture, from politics to every other field. And yet, we don't talk about trauma. Right. Right. So, try out treating the traumas that you were dealing with the trauma. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gabor, you were referring to trauma that's passed from generation to generation. And if I inferred correctly from your saying, it was based on the behavior. So, the behavior, the trauma gets passed through by the behavior of the parents to the children, then that results in addiction. But I keep reading about this field of epigenetics, where there may be an actual biological change. So, how sure are you that there's not a biological mechanism?

Well, it's not, there's no contradiction. So, you're quite right. So, epigenetics, for those of you that may not know the word, "epi" means on top of. So, genetics, epigenetics. So, it turns out that genes are turned on and off by the environment. And that happens early in life. So, that even two people with the same genes, if they have different experiences, they'll have different outcomes because in one case, the gene was turned off, the other was turned on. So, the trauma is passed on both behaviorally and in the pain that it induces in the child. That's clear because I can tell you that. But what I haven't said much about, I referred to it, was that if I look at the circuits in the brain that are affected by anxiety, or ADHD, or addiction, or any other mental health problem, these circuits develop in interaction with the environment. You see, the human brain is the least mature of any mammal. The horse can run on the first day of life. We can do that for a year and a half. And that's because we were born with large heads compared to speaking. Already at birth, the head is the largest part of the body. And the female, human female, has a relatively narrow pelvis compared to a horse, because we have to walk on two legs. So, narrow pelvis, large head, we have to get out there prematurely. And that means that most of our brain development, 80 to 90% of it, occurs after birth, and not before. Very affected by the emotional environment. So, that those, these are not just behavioral problems, they become physiological problems in the brain based on what happens in the environment. And on top of that, then, what you say is also true, that our gene functioning is also affected by trauma, multi-generational. And so, that you traumatize grandparents, and that still affects the genetic functioning of their grandchildren. So, that's true as well. So, it's all these things coming together. Having said that, though, the brain can develop new circuits even later, and really later on in life. And that's called neuroplasticity. For which, always say, thank God for neuroplasticity, because I'm 73 now, and I would not wish to be as stupid as what as I was when I was 71. You know? So, thank God that the brain can change. And that's why the word recovery is so interesting. Because when we talk about recovery, what does it mean to recover something? What are you, the way you do when you recover something? You find you get it back. I mean, you ask people, "When you've recovered, what did you get back?" They say, "I got back myself." So, the trauma, there's a loss of self. And in recovery, there's a reconnection with the self.

I wanted to ask you this question that I had written that I wanted to ask you, because I know at least six people there in this room, myself included, if someone was raped or molested as a child, as I was, how do you interact with your perpetrator if you still know them?

Well, first of all, let me say something else. People often think that the trauma was the rape. It wasn't. How old were you? And I'm not saying it wasn't traumatic. How old were you? I can remember started around eight. Okay. And how long did it go on for? A couple of years. Who would you speak to about it? No one. That's what's the trauma. If, I mean, if you had an 8-year-old child and some even looked into the wrong way just once, who do you want him to talk to? If you're the father, you... Yeah. If your 8-year-old child had such a horrific experience and he didn't talk to you, how would you explain that to yourself? I don't know. Well, you weren't available for them. And they already knew that they weren't available for them. So, that original trauma was the loss of the parenting contact. Because I have to guess that your parents were traumatized, and they just weren't emotionally there for you. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you know, and it's this way you sustain the trauma. So, so the rape then comes along as well as a secondary trauma. First trauma was the loss of protection and connection and safety in the world. Now, in terms of how you interact with them in the present, that depends precisely on where you're at. If you haven't dealt with it yet, if you haven't healed, if you haven't recovered, if you haven't connected with yourself, then whatever comes up is legitimate. If you're angry with them, if you hate them, that's legitimate. Why wouldn't you? If you don't want to see them and stay away from them, that's legitimate. And in fact, at anytime, whatever you decided is legitimate. However, what you'll find is that the more you heal, the more comfortable you'll get yourself. The less of a psychological threat they become to you, because you're whole and okay in yourself. They're not gonna disregulate you, they're gonna make you feel bad about yourself just by showing up. And you might even, and I'm not making this another thing that you should, but you might even find yourself getting to a point of compassion for them. And I've seen that happen as well, when a recovery is so complete that the first can actually have compassion, because, because the perpetrator, I assure you, was another traumatized person. In my case, absolutely. Yeah. I've worked through a lot with this individual, and, you know, I do have a lot of compassion because I know what happened to them. Same thing happened to them, right? And it's, it's sad. And in a lot of ways, I'm asking the question, I'm doing thankfully better in my life with my recovery than I ever have. It still is hard at times. It's still very hard. Yes. I know there's people in this room though that are just, like, livid and just outraged. And well, and that's perfect, isn't it? Isn't it? That's the anger of the, the helpless child. And that's the anger that they did that, that they took, that they turned against themselves, their lives. And one of the ways you do that is through the addiction. You know, so, so, and the depression. I mean, what is depression? If you look at this, it's interesting. Again, somebody talked about words. What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. When a kid experiences anger, but they can't express it because expressing it is too dangerous, then they push it down. Then they become depressed. So, that their anger then turns against itself. So, if the anger is coming out of them, that's great. But I hope to get some help with it so they can channel it in a healthy way, rather than because it could just keep exploding. And rage actually puts you at risk of a heart attack and a stroke. So, you might as well take that healthy anger and or that rage, even, and and find some channels for it and deal with it. Yeah. So, but there's no reason not to be angry at the perpetrator if that's there. That's nothing more than natural. Yeah.

Sure. Let me also mention, so we got Dr. Jamie Hope, who, Gabor, I met her a few months ago. Vern Harnish, who I believe is in the room, what's doing a scale-up summit? And it was a business conference. And me and Dean Graziosi spoke for about an hour and fifteen minutes or so, I think it was. And there's a thousand people in the room. The average business owner was, I think, worth like, twenty, had a twenty million dollar business. And Vern's like an amazing guy. And me and Dean spent, you know, most of the time talking about business. I think I spent two minutes talking about addiction. And it was early in the, the two-day session. John was there. And over the next two days, after I just mentioned for a couple minutes about addiction, nine out of ten people that came up and talked to me, their questions were not about business. They were about addiction. And I was like, wow, it really dawned on me just how prevalent this subject matter is. And that's what really kind of put me on this like, you know, bringing you here today. And by the way, if I haven't said it yet, I'm just so grateful that you did. Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. And I met Jamie, and she told me she works in the ninth busiest hospital in the US, emergency room in Detroit. And she has this incredible compassion for addicts. And we totally hit it off and have become dear friends since. And so, this is Dr. Jamie Howe. The first thing I actually wanted to say was, thank you for doing this. You wouldn't necessarily expect this at a business conference, but to see successful, influential, strong people talking about truth, talking about what it's like to be human, because we're all human in this room. And bringing it out in a way that is socially acceptable, that is such a huge thing. There are probably people in this room who have suffered trauma and haven't really faced it or spoken about it. So, the first thing I wanted to do was thank you guys. What you do matters. This is so huge. Thank you.

After lunch, when you were doing your interview with Akira, you, we had talked about respectable addictions versus drugs, in which we stigmatize. And you had some really interesting insights. And I think a lot of people in the room could relate to that when you were talking about that.

Yeah. So, again, I mentioned that so that my both addictions, the work was very respectable. It got me nothing but praise and income. And it created deep problems in life, looking at my family. You know, and then my shopping addiction, well, he's a lover of classical music. Is not wonderful? You know, but, but some of the respectable addictions, and I say this somewhat hesitantly, but I'll set it in anyway, in front of a business audience, I have to do with profit and power, where for some people, nothing is ever enough. And it's not, and it's not because they're bad people, but because they're trying to stuff a hole inside themselves. And then that can cause serious damage in the world, such as we're seeing with the environment and and climate change and other pollution and other issues. You know, so, these, or an addiction to power, like I'm just reading a biography of Napoleon. And Napoleon was a genius. He really liked. I need to talk about genius. Netter, and I, that was a genius for you.

So many ways, but he was also totally addicted to power. And even in exile, he said, "I love power." And he called Paris's mistress. Well, a lot of people died because of addiction, because of addiction to power. And yet, you know, he's a hero, he's respected. Whereas the, the substance addict who shoots up heroin in the back alley is, is ostracized and and and discarded from society. So, yeah, there's the respectable addictions, and then there is these arbitrarily chosen addicts on whom we project all our disdain and our all our self-judgment. Basically, the stuff you don't like about yourselves, we project onto these other people.

When I started talking about addiction in the Genius Network meetings, some people loved it. Other people were like, "What the hell? I didn't come join Genius Network here, you talk about addictions." And this one guy literally dropped out of the group because he didn't like me talking about addiction. And then he contacted me a few months later and he's like, "I'm gonna be in Phoenix, can we have lunch?" And we get together for lunch and then he's like, "I am so sorry. My daughter, we, is a heroin addict. I'm a workaholic. It just was too close to home." And he's like, "And I gave him some suggestions and you got her in treatment and now she's doing much better."

And I just want to plant a seed today. That's why I brought Gabor here. I want to plant a seed. Some of you totally are in this conversation. Others are like, "It's, it's getting worse. The world is." I mean, you just look at the opiate addiction. We need voices. We need people of influence that could share something that is helpful because you cannot punish pain out of people. In the criminal justice system, and you said, in, in one of your talks, that if you wanted to create the perfect system that would keep people addicted, you would create the exact prison system that we have in the United States. And, and it's true. It's very simple. I mean, if you, if you look at your own addictions, those of you, and most of you raised your hand, and when you gave it up for a while, and then you relapsed, what usually happened that caused a relapse? Usually something stressful happened. So, as your way of dealing with stress, so it follows that the more you stress people, the more you entrench them in their addictions. So, create a system that ostracizes and punishes and torments people and exiles them from society, you're just making sure that they're gonna stay there. That's all.

So, what didn't I ask you that I should have, if anything? 'Cause I could go on for a long time, but we're on, we're on the clock. But there's so many different areas.

Mm-hmm. Well, I don't know that there's much that you didn't ask me that you should, that you should have. I, what I was really hoping to do here in conversation with you is just to get across just how human is for this phenomenon of addiction is. And, and, and if we approach it at understanding and, and curiosity, but the person who's experiencing it, or in our own case, real compassionate curiosity for ourselves, then we can actually deal with the problem. Yeah.

One thing I'll mention is, oh yeah, semantics. Yeah. I want to distinguish two kinds of trauma. So, there's a word trauma, and then is what we call developmental trauma. And we have two very great examples of it in the United States. So, what is trauma? Do it separates us from ourselves. We lose ourselves, like we said. It also gives us a very negative view of the world. So, if you have a negative view of the world, then we act accordingly. We are defensive, and we're grandiose, and we're aggressive. So, there's a man who said that the world is a horrible place. No, I'm not commenting any on anybody's politics here. I'm talking pure psychology, okay? I'm not talking what policy, foreign or domestic. I'm talking about mind states. Please understand that. So, however you voted in this last election, don't take offense, please. But the man who said that the world is a horrible place is the President of the United States. Master world he lives in. Why does he live in that world? Because he could grow up in a family that taught him that his father was a domineering rageaholic tyrant who demeaned his children. His brother drank himself to death. And this man develops all these issues like attention problems and grandiosity. And psychiatrists have diagnosed him with narcissism and all this kind of stuff, which are not false. They are the outcomes of trauma. So, there's that overt trauma. And we live in such a traumatized society that these people actually rise to the top.

But his opponent was even more interesting. I don't know if you saw the Democratic National Convention. And when Hillary won the nomination, there was a video narrated about her life by God himself, Morgan Freeman. You know how many of you saw that video about her life? No. There was something very interesting in that video that I saw no comments on whatsoever. This anecdote comes from Hillary. And what happens is that, and it's expressed as an example of wonderful character building, strength building parenting. What happens is that the four-year-old Hillary runs into her home to her mother afraid because neighborhood kids are bullying her, threatening her. And the mother says, "There is no room for cowards in this house. Now you get out there and you deal with it." And this is presented as this made me tough, and this made me a fighter, and it is a character building. Now, the men, the actual message to the child is not that there's no room for cowards in this house because the four-year-old, a five-year-old who runs to mom is only doing what any mammal will do, any young mammal will do when they're threatened. They'll go to their protective figures. It's not cowardice, it's just natural attachment. The message is, there's no room for vulnerability in this house. You have to be tough. You have to suck it up.

Now, jump 65 years ahead to the presidential campaign. And there's a famous scene where Trump is looming all over, hovering all over Hillary. And she doesn't say a thing. She's just sucking it up. And then she develops pneumonia. Remember during the campaign, she had pneumonia? How did the world find out that she had pneumonia? Because she collapsed. And her security people had to pick her up. But she didn't tell anybody about it. She didn't talk about it because she learned in an early age to suck it up. And she must not be vulnerable. So, what I'm saying, and that's what's called developmental trauma. We're not when something bad happens to you, but when the good things that should happen don't happen. And the good thing that didn't happen is the mother should've scooped her up and said, "Well, boy, you're really scared, aren't you?" That's what didn't happen. And so, I'm saying is that is that overt trauma. And there's lots of studies on how overt trauma. If those of you are not familiar with the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies, the ACE studies, where they looked at 17,000 Californians, most, half of them university graduates. And the more adversity there was in their childhood, the meaning physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, death of a parent, a divorce, can be addicted, apparently mentally ill, violence in the family, neglect of a pending child. For each of these adverse experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially. And you can download your ACE score just by going to the internet. It'll give you a lot of insight about yourself. But there's that other kind of trauma, which is the developmental trauma, which doesn't happen because bad things happen to you, but just because you weren't held in the way you needed to be held. So, that's the final thing I wanted to tell you.

Great. Thank you. And for people to read your books, watch your videos. I mean, I'm gonna put a lot of Gabor's work on geniusrecovery.com, which is the educational platform we're creating. And we'll have them featured in a documentary. The stuff we're doing with Artists for Addicts. Your books, you know, "When the Body Says No," "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts," "Scattered." I know you have a new book coming out. "In Your Head." Yes. "In Your Head." Okay. Hey, it's all in our head. It's all God. So, how do people find more about you? Well, on my website is www.drgabormate.com. Both with my website and, and on YouTube.

Great. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. Thank you.

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