Dr. Gabor Maté is a highly sought expert on a wide range of topics such as addiction, stress, and childhood development. He has written many books, of which several are best-sellers, including the award-winning “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts” , “Close Encounters with Addiction”, and “When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Culture.” Gabor’s work has been published internationally and in more than 30 languages.
In this episode, Eric and Dr. Maté discuss his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!
Dr. Gabor Mate and I Discuss How to …
- His book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
- Defining the myths of normal
- How the increasing anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues are a result of toxic culture
- Stress and trauma can begin for a child in utero, at childbirth, and throughout childhood
- The modern stresses of our world contributes to a toxic culture
- How parents pass down their traumas to their children
- Defining trauma as a psychic wound that happens inside of you
- The healing process is the recovery of self
- Understanding the clash between attachment and authenticity
- How emotions and immune systems are part of the same system
- The importance of understanding the important link between emotions and physical health
- Trauma imposed self beliefs are the main obstacles of healing
- Remembering that healing is a lifelong process
- The 4 A’s of healing: authenticity, agency, acceptance, and anger (healthy)
—
Dr. Gabor Mate Links:
By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!
If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr, Gabor Maté, check out these other episodes:
Frank Sterle Jr. says
I live with adverse-childhood-experience-related chronic anxiety and clinical depression that are only partly treatable via medication. Thus I endure an emotionally tumultuous daily existence. It’s a continuous, discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’ and simultaneously being scared of how badly I will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires.
The lasting emotional/psychological pain from such trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside the head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others. … It all can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of medicating, either prescribed or illicit.
My experience has revealed [at least to me] that high-scoring-ACE trauma, that essentially results from a highly sensitive introverted existence notably exacerbated by an accompanying autism spectrum disorder, can readily lead an adolescent to a substance-abuse/self-medicating disorder, including through eating.
The greater the drug-induced euphoria/escape one attains from its use, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape should be perceived. By extension, the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for escape from reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.
Hopefully, the preconceived erroneous notion that drug addicts are simply weak-willed and/or have committed a moral crime is gradually diminishing. We do know that pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiates — I call it the real moral crime — for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
And though I’ve not been personally affected by the poisoned-drug-supply crisis, I have suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known, enjoyed and appreciated the great release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC. Yet, I had been one of those who, while sympathetic, would look down on those who’d ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and/or illicit ‘hard’ drugs.
Either way, neglecting people dealing with debilitating drug addiction should never have been an acceptable or preferable political option.