YouSaid · the spoken record

Gabor Maté

lines on the record: 140
first: 2022-11-07
most recent: 2022-11-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, look, the disease model is, as long as we understand it's a model, it's okay. I think it describes reality fully. It doesn't. For example, we talk about mental illnesses. and we are assuming that there's a kind of definite pathology there just as in rheumatoid arthritis you can describe the inflammation of the joints and the blood levels of certain antibodies being abnormal and Hormonal levels being disturbed, you know. Making the same assumption in mental illness. There's no such evidence in mental illness. There's no physiological parameters that you can say somebody's got mental illness. There's just been a study a few months ago of thousands of brain scans.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a description, it's helpful as an explanation as to why this person isn't behaving quote unquote norm Doesn't explain a thing. None of you understood that I spent my infancy under very difficult circumstances where I was very stressed because of all the stuff I already talked about. And that tuning out was a normal response. Those circumstances as a way of protecting myself from the stress of it all. And this is happening when my brain was developing. Then you understand there's nothing abnormal by tuning out. In fact, it is the normal response to a set of abnormal circumstances. So that's the first point. And I could go to the same kind of dialectic with all manner of physical and mental diseases, by the way, so-called. Second point is”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, It's a multi-layered answer. First of all, we would recognize that our diagnoses are not explanations for anything. So, you know, I've been diagnosed with ADD, you know, legitimately so. My first book was on it. But it doesn't explain anything. And so I tune out easily, very easily. And sometimes when I don't want to, but, you know. On a Somali motivated So you might say this person has ADD. How do we know? Because it tunes out a lot. Why is it doing a lot? It's got AD. How do we know it's got ADD? Because it tunes out a lot. So first of all, we have to understand that our understanding of normal and what's outside the normal, doesn't explain anything. They can describe, if you describe my mental functioning as that of somebody who's got an automatic tendency to tune out, you'd be accurate.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This idea that the people who are ill, either physically or mentally abnormal, I say no, these are normal responses to an abnormal set of circumstances. And rather than being sort of those abnormal ones and then the rest of us, it's really a spectrum that we're all pretty much all on it. So in those three senses, this idea of normal is a myth. And it's one that keeps us from seeing reality.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a myth to say that what is normal is healthy and natural. That's what I mean by the myth of normal. That's one thing I mean. The other thing I mean is if we understand that the actual science of the unity of everything, I'm not talking about spiritual insight here, I'm talking about physiological science that are physiology and psychology is very much affected by our life experiences being in utero, childbirth, early childhood, and throughout the lifetime. It also follows that illness and health are not individual attributes. They are actually manifestations of our relationships and our situation in the world and our history. That also means when these circumstances are abnormal. You expect people to be sick, just as if you gave animals something that wasn't healthy for them. They'd be sick. That'd be what you'd expect. So”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the neomedical sense, it's accurate, but in a broader sense, that which we used to in this society we consider normal is just not good for us. And norm is kind of a statistic or it's a kind of average. So if everybody has a dog, if everybody in London mistreated their dogs, and if you didn't, then you'd be abnormal.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, So Tony Lizzie and Vancouver, like I do. And in one of his books, he says, the normal state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we might call this function or even madness. So in medical parlance, normal means healthy and natural. So there's a normal range of blood pressure, normal... It's a range. Outside that range, there's no life. There's no health, either too high or too low, you're gone. So, normal means it's equivalent with, synonymous with healthy and natural. However, we make that same assumption that out in society what we used to, what we call normal, is also healthy and natural, which is a myth. Because I'm saying that in this society, what we consider to be normal is neither healthy nor natural. In fact, it's hurtful to us so that using the word normal in a way that... Doesn't apply.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That dynamic was in me. Once I realized it, I let go of it, so it didn't dominate me in the end. And honest to God, by the time I finished the book, I'm not just saying this in retrospect. It's a bestseller now in several countries. I actually said to myself, and I meant it now, I've done the book That's what matters. I've said what was in me to say. How the world reacts, I can't control. And it doesn't actually matter. On a fundamental level, it's not that I don't want this book to be success. I mean, success, of course I wanted to sell 10 zillion copies. That doesn't define my self worth or high function in the world or I feel about myself. Honestly it does not and I understood that by the time I finished working on it So once it's done, it's out there doing its work or not doing its work”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is just a book. It may be a good book. It may be an important book, maybe a book that doesn't hit the mark. But it's only a book. And how it goes says nothing about me or my worth. Once I could decouple that, then I could confidently and much more comfortably go back to the writing of it. But I went to that crisis.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, not the external. Well, look, I went through that in the writing of this book. So here I am, this writer who writes about trauma and healing, and all of a sudden I'm in a panic because I'm writing a book. And I realized that the problem was that you talked about identifying with your work. So I'd identify with this book. So the problem wasn't a book. Because let's say I write the book and it's not a success. I mean, okay, big headline in the Sunday Times, book Not a Big Success. How big a big deal is that in the history of the universe? But if identify with the book and it's not going well, then if the book fails, then I'm feeling as a person, which then goes back to my very earliest concern about not being worth it. So once I disidentified.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That community doesn't have to take the form of formal art, but it does have to take some flow of something that's inside you that needs to come out. Otherwise, as Celia says, you get hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. And so in that sense, everybody's got that creative urge, and that may take the form of social intercourse. It might take the form of gardening. I don't care, communing with nature. Athletic expression. I don't care what. But everybody's got it. And if people don't realize they have it, it's only because life has hemmed them in and they're too busy. And sometimes they are trying to make a living or trying to survive or to disconnect it from themselves. But it's in all of us. And to the extent that we don't give it expression, we suffer.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mior created an image of God. I mean, what are your religious views are, but that sense that we created images of God means that we are creators because the essence of God is creation. In fact, we call God the Creator and we call the result of that creation. If we were offshoots of that creative dynamic in the universe, then it means that it's in us to create. And whatever form that takes, I mean, you know, you don't want to see me. Do art, unless I can do a pretty good stick figure by maritime.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're singing my tune here, if I may say it that way, because I quote in this book, there's a great Hungarian Canadian stressed researcher called Janos Selier, S-E-L-Y-E, and Celia is the one who actually coined the word stress in the sense that we use it today, and he's the one that showed an laboratory how stress diminishes the immune system and disorganizes the hormones and ulcerates the stomach and all this kind of stuff. Sali also said, and I quote him here, what is in us must out? What is in us must out? That we all have to follow urges in a way that nature prepared for us, otherwise we can be hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. I'm paraphrasing very closely. So”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I began to write when I was a physician. So my first book. On ADHD after I was diagnosed, it was published in 1999 now, so that was 23 years ago. So I began to write, and even before then, I wrote because I wrote columns for newspapers. But yes, there was a time in my life where the writing impulse, which had been with me all my life, was stifled and stymied. So was I because I had this frustration. In fact, I had the sense that there's something I needed to express. But I didn't know what and I didn't know how. And at some point I realized, oh yeah, I need to write. So that began before I finished medical practice, but it certainly. Has been essential to my ongoing unfolding as a human being.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“human genuine interaction. So there was that aspect of it. The other aspect of it was that Again my view is, as I pointed in this book and in previous works, who gets sick and who isn't exactly accidental? There are certainly personally patterns based on traumatic experiences in childhood that make disease more likely. And people very often realize that throughout their lives they had abandoned who they were. They lived the life that didn't wasn't meaningful for them. Around that, they're reconnected with themselves in an authentic way. And that seemed to be worth a lot to people. Again, I don't recommend that way of going to reconnect with yourself, but people have certainly, I certainly saw it. So those are the two big lessons.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People react to their impending death in different ways. So there were some people who just Fought it to the end. They didn't really want to accept it. But most people were more along the lines that you described, where they really get to see what's important. And so I mentioned this a number of times. It sounds strange. And I don't recommend it. But I've had patients say to me, Doctor, I don't know how to tell you this and I can't even explain it perhaps, but this illness that's going to take my life is the best thing that have happened to me. And what my men, they meant a couple of things about it. They meant what you just said about finding out what's really important in life. In this book, The Mython Normal, Into you, a young man called Will Pye, who wrote a book called Blessed with a Brain Tumor. What kind of a blessing is that? So I said, I asked, Will, what's the blessing? And he said, it made me appreciate every moment. It meant every time I talked to somebody, I knew this might be the last conversation I'm going to have with them. So it better be a...”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little suffering as possible and as much dignity as possible. So it really challenges the best parts of you to show up. Patience, acceptance, intuition. Personally, it taught me a lot to listen to people. Interesting enough, people really want to be heard when they're dying. They want to make sense of their lives. They want to tell their stories. They want their stories to be heard. And so I listened a lot. I just sat by the bedside and I listened. All that.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took an acceptance of one's Lack of Lack of omnipotence as a physician, because you want to cure people, you want people to heal. It takes a tremendous acceptance to say, you know, we reached the limit of our knowledge. That doesn't mean we can't help people, but we certainly can't cure them. And so it taught me how to be with the inevitable. And when you're working with people who are in a process of dying, I mean, by the way, who isn't in the process of dying, you know, but people whose time is more limited than the rest of us, acceptance, you learn a lot of acceptance. It challenges you to do your best. When you know your best isn't going to be saving anybody's lives, but it's to help people live a life of”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drug use in a society that doesn't understand drug use, so it punishes it, excludes it, our societizes it, so people get HIV from dirty needles and hepatitis C. So this is the population, often they're homeless. So that's the population I worked with for 12 years till the end of my medical work.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was a family physician, which meant I delivered a lot of babies and I looked after people's problems from beginning to end of life. I also worked in palliative care. I was the director of a unit at the hospital which looked after people with terminal disease. That was 22 years or so of my practice, 20, 22 years. And then I switched gears altogether and I went to work in the downtown east side of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more people coming from anywhere in the world are shocked by what they see. There are thousands of people in the streets injecting, selling, using, inhaling. Ingesting dogs of all kinds, and people suffer the consequences of”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At 28, I went back to medical school, actually. I took a detour. I was a high school teacher for a while. And then I was 27, 28 when I started medical school. At age 33, I think I began my medical career of 32 years.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Children interpret it that way. That's just the whole point. That's what I mean about kids being narcissists, I don't mean that in the negative sense. I just, I mean, actually, they think it's all about them. So if your mother is unhappy, It's your fault. And you're not good enough. So then you have to go out there and work to prove to the world and to yourself that you're good enough. So that, going back to your first question about how these things show up in our lives, that's how they show up.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in your case, like race and class in this society of inequality are certainly traumatic, potentially traumatic inputs, as I pointed in his book, to the degree that it affects people's physiology. But also then, I don't know your family version or what kind of relationship you have with your parents, but there also may have been a sense, like I got with my mom for reasons and for whatever might have happened in your family, maybe you go to sense as well that even in your family of origin you weren't. Good enough somehow”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the toxicity of the culture that I talk about in this book is that it actually rewards that kind of emptiness or that desperate seeking to fill that emptiness because you get rewarded, you make a lot of money. A lot of people admire you. You get to feel good about yourself. My guess is that good feeling is only temporary, at least if my example is any guided feeling good because somebody from the outside values you is only a temporary self or the wound that's inside. But the world actually rewards it. You're a work colleague doctor. Great. You make more money and all these people respect you. Meanwhile, you're hollowing yourself from the inside and you're not available for your family, you know, so that's part of the craziness of this culture.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“getting angry because it's my sense of not being good enough that's being now revealed that it gets uncovered this this this self-accusation but I get angry at her because her job is to make me not feel that we get into this relationship For all kinds of reasons. Some of them are conscious, some are not, some are positive, some are come out of trauma in my case. I want that relationship to prove to me how good I am. So, when it isn't proving that, then I get upset with my partner. Well, except the gap is inside me, not inside. It's not coming from her. So it shows up in my parenting. It shows up all over the place.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're looking at it from the outside, it's addictive because you get it temporarily, but then that internal emptiness, that whole, never goes away. So it has to be filled over and over and over again. It can only be done so temporarily. So it becomes runaway addictive. So then, you know, work becomes an addiction because I keep trying to prove my worth. And it doesn't matter how many times I may show up in a positive way at the beginning of someone life, at the end of somebody else's life, or anytime in between. It never fills that emptiness, that my sense of lack of worthiness creates. So that's one way it shows up. Another way it shows up is if in my relationship. I don't feel as satisfied. My wife doesn't please me the way I like her too. Then I get angry. But what am I getting angry?”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made me a workholic physician because I had to keep proving my worth. And it doesn't matter. Now, I don't know if you ever had an addiction, but the nature of it is that we're trying to get from the outside something that only can arise and fulfill us from the inside.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, by bringing up to the conscious level. Then when I noticed that sense of guilt or responsibility in me, I say, oh, that's what it's about. So it's a meaning as I define it is not about what happens to us. It's about what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. And so the wound in trauma means wound. So the wound in this case is my sense of deficiency or not being good enough, not being worthy enough. Once I realize that, oh, this has got nothing to do with anything except this interpretation that I made of my own experience all those years ago, then when I noticed it, I can no longer believe it. I don't have any no longer be a Subject to that individual of myself in the world. So awareness is one step. It's not adequate, but it's an essential step towards letting go.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I start crying. Tears come down to my face, and I say, I'm so sorry I made your life so difficult. That was an unconscious memory of my sense of myself as a one-year-old, that I made my mother's life so difficult, because that's the way the baby interprets it. So even if your mother loves you, which mine did infinitely, not as she always treated me the best way possible, but she did love me. And can you imagine a great act of love even giving me to a stranger in the street would have been for her? But because of her own unhappiness, I can only conclude that I'm not good enough. And it is my fault”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because she doesn't want me, or I can't make her happy, or I'm inadequate. So that separation from my mother Sunni set a template for some of my relationship interactions with my spouse decades later, but the sense of not being good enough and being responsible, that was inculcated in me throughout that whole first year of life, so much so that in his book The Mythonormal, I actually talk about an experience with the psychiatric mushrooms with a therapist. This is not that long ago, seven years ago maybe when I'm at least 70 years old and I'm in this therapeutic session with the cytopen, the medicine, and the therapist, and I know that I'm 78 years old, and I know this is a therapy session, and I know her name, and I know who I am in the world, but at the same time I'm experiencing myself as a one-year-old baby, and she's my mother.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say it's just that one moment. Children very much view themselves through their interactions with their parents. Now, first of all, I had no father because he was gone. I hadn't seen him. Very briefly that when I was a month old, but there was no father in the picture. My mother was grief stricken and terrorized and full of woe and worry about what's going to happen to us and just the task of surviving each day. She's not playful with me. She's not smiling at me very much. She's worried looking, she's stressed looking. The infant takes everything personally. That's just the nature of the infant. As infants, we're a narcissist. We think it's all about us. So when things are great, hey, we're great. But my mommother is unhappy.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the fact is that my mothers are stressed or in pain, the infant feels all that and takes it personally and it becomes part of their template for how they view the world. So that was when that year began in which my grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and my father was away in forced labor and my mother and I barely survived. And it's a story I've told many times. That's when my brain is developing, and that's when I'm forming my sense of myself. And then my mother to save my life gives me to a stranger and I don't see her for six weeks. The sense I get is that I'm not wanted and I'm being rejected and abandoned because I'm not good enough. That's how my life began”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At two months of age, when I was two months of age, the German army occupied Hungary. Hungary was the last country in Eastern Europe where the Jewish population had not been exterminated, and that was our turn. The day after the German army marched into Budapest, which was marched the nineteenth to 1944, the day after my mother called the pediatrician to say, will you please come and see Gabor? Because he's crying all the time. And the doctor said, of course I'll come, but all my Jewish babies are crying.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's just a fact about human beings that The template that forms us will affect how we see the world, how we understand ourselves, how we relate to other people. And that really template is our earliest months, even in Utah, already in the womb. We're being affected by the environment, but certainly in the early years, when our brain is being formed and our personality is taking shape And so that forms our worldview. Now, my worldview was, in my sense of self, was shaped by the fact that”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“expelled the Nazis from Budapest, which is where we lived. So she was referring to the previous year and the beginning of that year, late 1944 and early 1945.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any number of ways. See, traumas I define it is not about what happens to us. It's about what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. It's costing us in terms of our physical health, our relationship, our mental health, and so on.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz, and my mother and I barely survived, and then my mother, to save my life, gives me still a stranger. The sense I get is that I'm being rejected and abandoned because I'm not good enough.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Him, these were not choices so much as survival techniques, and that's the mark of a traumatized child, a denial of reality.”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“evidence linking mental illness and childhood adversity is about as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer and the average physician doesn't hear a word about that it's astonishing i can give you the example of a donald trump i mean his father was a psychopath”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children. They didn't inherit anything in terms of a disease. They're just reacting to the environment”
2022-11-07 · The Diary of a CEO · Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT