Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so glad that you chose to listen to this episode because today I've got somebody in our Boston studios whose work has fundamentally changed my life.
This person has helped me understand exactly how my childhood shaped who I became as an an adult.
And today he's gonna do the exact same thing for you.
Because what's happened to you in your past, first of all, it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility to yourself to do the work that you need to do in order to heal, to grow, to become healthier and happier.
And today you're gonna learn exactly how to do it.
You're also gonna learn that no matter what it is that you may have survived in your childhood, it does not define who you are or who you can become.
You're gonna get a road map to better understanding yourself and also how you can connect with your true self.
The extraordinary Dr. Gabor Mate is here.
He's written five books on the topic of childhood development, trauma, stress, ADHD, addiction, all of which are New York Times best sellers.
And it has taken me two years to get him to our studios here in Boston because he is in that much demand globally.
Dr. Mate is gonna help you understand exactly how your childhood shaped you.
You're also gonna learn more than ten surprising ways that trauma is created in childhood, even if you didn't realize it.
And how it is probably still impacting you to this day right now.
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Hey, it's your friend Mal.
I am so thrilled that you're here with me.
It is always an honor to be able to spend time together with you.
If you're brand new, welcome to the Mal Robbins podcast. And I know because you chose to listen to this episode that you're the type of person who values your time and you're also interested in learning about ways that you can improve your life.
I love that. I love that you're listening to this episode and you wanna know what else I love?
I love that you and I are gonna get to spend time learning from the extraordinary Dr. Gabor Mate.
Dr. Mate is a world -renowned physician and bestselling author whose work dives deep into childhood development and the impact of trauma on how it shapes your mental and physical health over your lifetime.
Dr. Mate has completely transformed how the world sees, talks about and understands trauma, and he has absolutely had that impact on me and it's been life -changing.
I promise you this episode is gonna shift the way you see everything.
How you show up for yourself, how you connect with the people you love, and why you experience life the way that you do.
It's gonna help you understand why coping has become your default and how you can move toward true healing.
I am so excited for both you and me.
Please help me welcome the extraordinary Dr. Gabor Mahtay to the Mel Robbins podcast. I'm so excited to welcome you, Dr. Gabor Mahtay to the Mel Robbins podcast. Thank you for having me.
Before we dive in, Gabor, I'd love to have you speak directly to the person who's listening to us.
and just share with them what they might expect to experience if they really take to heart what you're about to teach us and share with us today?
Well, a lot of people are facing challenges.
A lot of people are very hard on themselves.
A lot of people think there's something wrong with them.
My fundamental understanding and what I've learned is that underneath there's nothing wrong with anybody, that everything you're dealing with came along for a reason.
There were adaptations, or there were responses, to difficult situations.
And the more you can understand where your issues came from and even when your negative self, you and the shame and the self -loathing and the self -criticism and the perfectionism that you experience, that there are actually responses to some kind of life experience.
And that fundamentally, there was and there is nothing wrong with you, and those things can be looked at and you can understand them and you can transform that and it really become yourself who you are.
That's available to you, it's available to everybody, so nobody's damaged goods.
I love that. No one is damaged goods.
Yeah. We are gonna unpack this in this conversation at length, but I think it might be helpful for someone who is not familiar with your work.
Yeah. If we could go back.
Sure. Yeah. And can you share, if we go all the way back to your childhood, just what was happening in your life and in particular how finding your mother's journal really impacted you and sent you in a certain direction in terms of your life's work?
Well, so I was born 80 years ago this year in Budapest, Hungary, January, 1944, before, the Jewish parents whose lives were already impacted by the Second World War.
My father was in forced labor with the Hungarian army.
A Jewish man had to go into forced labor when he was born, so he wasn't there when I was born.
In March, the German army occupied Hungary.
And then the genocide, the Holocaust, that had obliterated the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, but not yet that of Hungary's, began in our country.
And within three months between March and June, they murdered half a million Jews, including my grandparents.
And we came very close to being deported ourselves, my mother and I.
So I spent the first year of my life under Nazi occupation, with the mother who was terrorized and grief struck, didn't know if my father was dead or alive for most of that year.
And then when I was 11 months of age, to save my life, mother gave me to a complete stranger Christian moment in the street, and she conveyed me to some relatives living in relative safety and hiding.
I didn't see her for five or six weeks.
And all this is recorded in the journal that she kept.
I didn't discover the journal.
I always had this her journal, but for many years when I tried to read it, I get dizzy.
It's almost like sending me new that this is too painful for me to handle." So it wasn't until some years ago, when my mother's still alive, when I asked her to actually read the journal to me so I could really read what happened.
And she wrote in the journal that I'm writing this because if my son grows up, I want him to know what happened.
And so that's in a nutshell, but those events left a deep imprint in my nervous system, in my body, in my psyche.
And those traumatic events created a lot of psychological wounds in me that took me some years to even recognize, let alone to heal.
and it wasn't until I was into late adulthood and...
or middle age that I really began to deal with it and to recognize the subsequent impacts that then I passed on to my kids without meaning to, but just for the lack of awareness.
So, that's it in a nutshell.
Well, that's a big nutshell.
Yeah. So, how did those experiences in your life really start to shape your work.
Like how did you start doing what you do today?
Well, before it shaped my work, it shaped me and how I functioned in the world or how I disfunctioned in the world in so many ways.
So it's when I began to experience challenges in my life.
I was a successful doctor, in my early 40s.
I respected, but depressed and unhappy.
I was married to the love of my life, and we had a very strained, conflictual marriage.
And my kids had issues.
And some ways they were afraid of me, because I was very unpredictable.
So all those issues then made me start looking for some answers.
So the work began by having to look at myself and trying to understand the sources of my behaviors.
and I coincided with me noticing things as a physician in my medical practice.
And that's how I began to look at childhood development, the impact of early years, the concept of trauma and what that represented and its impact on adult or childhood mental health, physical illness and so on.
So both my personal experience and my professional work kind of led me in this direction of exploration.
And what have you learned about how childhood experiences shape who we become as adults?
They're largely decisive.
This begins even before birth.
It's already the emotional states of the mother while carrying the baby will affect the child's brain development.
I just want to make sure that the person that's with us in this conversation really gets this.
Because I didn't first learn that your emotional state and your physical state when you're carrying the child impacts the nervous system and development of the human being inside you.
And it makes sense, but can you explain more about that?
Because this is an idea that was brand new to me just a couple of years ago.
Sure. And what we have to nail down first My first is when not blaming mothers here.
They do their best. We were talking about the stress that's acting on a pregnant woman, that's no fault of her own.
But, speaking of stress, when people are stressed, they release stress hormones for development of cortisol.
When a mother is stressed in pregnancy, those stress hormones go through the placenta, the umbilical cord to the baby.
That affects the shots in the nervous system and there's development, the cortisol has a huge impact under the law of important brain circuits.
You can look at the heart rate of infants in the womb as it changes, as the mother's more or less stressed.
So these are just physiological facts.
So there was a study done after 9 -11 after the tragedy of 9 -11, women who were pregnant and who suffered post -traumatic stress disorder in the third trimester of pregnancy as a result of 9 -11, their infant set up normal stress hormone levels a year later.
Now abnormal stress hormone levels have an impact on brain development and on physiology and physiological health as well.
So you can expect those kids unless something's done to correct it to face more challenges later on.
And we know that mothers who are stressed, doing pregnancy, depressed, doing pregnancy, their children are more likely to have ADHD, attention deficit disorder, or other mental health challenges.
So it's just, now what's interesting here is indigenous people have always known this.
I was talking to a native group in British Columbia where I live, and this guy comes up to me and says, you know, doc, in our community when a woman was pregnant, there was a rule that if you're stressed or upset, you were not permitted to go near them.
We didn't want your stress and upset to affect the baby.
So this modern science has only confirmed indigenous wisdom, but it's a huge issue in this country, in this culture, because people are so stressed, for so many reasons.
Well, it's interesting to listen to you explain all this, because for me personally, your Your work has impacted both me and recognizing the way that childhood experiences and me when I was inside my mother developing into a baby.
And then I think about your work in the context of me as a stressed out mother and the state that I was in when I was carrying any one of our three children and how that absolutely impacted their development.
There's this kind of conflict that I feel between, oh gosh, you know, I hurt my kids and I didn't mean to.
And also this understanding that I think this is part of the human experience on some level.
Well, first of all, when my mother was carrying me, I don't think she even wanted to be pregnant.
I mean, what Jewish woman really wanted to be pregnant in the middle of the Second World War when her husband is in forced labor?
already in utero, kids can feel if they're not wanted, I've seen this show up in many, many, many, many ways.
Now, the thing that I would pick up with you is on the one hand, there's the awareness that this is what happened, but the way you formulated it, that you hurt your kids, no pain flowed through you to your children, but you didn't hurt them.
You didn't, it's not that you did something deliberately or consciously to hurt them.
It's just that the way it worked is that trauma is transmitted transgenerationally.
But that's not to blame anybody.
And it's really important to remove blame because parents feel so guilty already.
Parents with kids who have challenges.
Believe me. I've been one of them.
There's a tremendous sense of guilt, which is entirely unwarranted and undeserved, and it doesn't even help.
So let's just agree that the trauma does come through us.
But we don't do it as such. That is incredibly helpful way to think about it, the way you said that it's pain moving through you.
Yeah, yeah. That made my shoulders drop.
How do you define trauma particularly for somebody who isn't aware whether or not they've experienced it?
The way I define it, this is very straightforward. Trauma comes from a Greek word for wound or wounding.
So traumas are wound.
It's a psychological wound in its case.
It could be a physical wound, but here we're talking about psychological wounds.
The important distinction to make is that trauma is not what happened to you, it's what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you.
So in my case, my trauma wasn't that my mother gave me to a stranger.
The trauma was the wound, which is that I perceive myself as not wanted.
I perceive myself as abandoned.
Who gets abandoned?
Somebody who doesn't deserve to be loved.
So then I develop this sense of not being good enough, not being lovable enough.
Now that means, I spend much of my life trying to prove that I'm good, that I'm lovable, that I am important, which then drives all kinds of behaviors, which then create more problems. But the trauma is not the event.
That's the traumatic episode, but the trauma is the wound that happens inside you.
So, if I get a blow in the head, that's not the trauma.
The trauma is the concussion that I developed.
Now in that case, it's physical.
And I wanna kind of hover here because for a long time, I just assumed trauma was something that happened to people who were at war or in a country that was occupied by a fascist government or country coming in, like your parents were and that you were or somebody that was the victim of a violent crime.
I never understood that experiences that may seem insignificant on the surface, somebody's mood, somebody criticizing you, feeling left out, that these are things that can also leave a mark, just like a blow to a head can actually leave a concussion.
And I would love for you to explain to us what actually is a psychological wound.
Because one of the things that I see happening a lot is people either shame themselves for being stuck, or they say, I'm just too emotional, or I should just get over it.
And there is something deeper that you mean when you say it's a psychological wound.
Well that self talk, that negative self talk that you used articulated is itself a psychological wound.
It's a sign of psychological wound.
It's a sign of self rejection.
Which is one of the deepest impacts of trauma is that people traumatized to develop a shame based view of themselves.
So they began to think that there's nothing wrong with them.
That itself is a wound.
Now when you talk about seemingly insignificant things, we have to make a distinction here.
There are what we call the big T traumatic events.
Those have been well studied.
Physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, of children, neglect, a parent being addicted, a parent dying, a parent being jailed, violence in the family, a rancor's divorce, a parent being mentally ill, to which we need to add social factors such as poverty or racism.
These are big T -traumatic events that can wound kids and we can talk about the ways I mean that happens.
But, you can also wound kids, not by doing bad things to them that you shouldn't, but by not doing the good things that they need.
in other words, children have certain needs, the human child is born with certain evolution -determined needs.
Those children whose needs are not met that way, for example, for unconditional loving acceptance.
And I'm not talking about the parents love, I'm talking about the capacity of the parent to unconditionally accept the child and to see the child.
What do you mean when you say unconditional acceptance?
Because I think most of us, it's revelatory to hear.
No, no, no. There's a biological hardwired need that you have as a child to feel unconditional acceptance and safety from the adults around you and in your environment.
And if you do not feel that way it creates a response inside your body.
There's a reaction to that, but most of us, I think we even just skip over that fact, Gabor, that there's a fundamental need that a child has to feel accepted.
And And so, what does that mean if you could unpack it for us?
Sure. Children get to experience and see themselves the way they are seen by the adults.
So, if a child gets emotional and they get criticized, then there's something wrong with their emotions.
If a child is very sensitive and they're told, don't be so sensitive, they think there's something wrong with them.
If a child, a young toddler is behaving a certain way and the parent thinks that the way to correct this is to punish the child, then the child, and the child is just being a two year old, then the child begins to believe that there's something wrong with them, and they have to compensate for that by meeting the parents' expectations.
So, now the acceptance since it's no longer unconditional.
I'll accept you if you look this way, talk this way, behave this way, and then all your life you'll be worried about how the people see you.
That's a sign of a childhood wound because fundamentally, we need to be connected to ourselves.
And when parents don't see us, we don't see ourselves.
That's just the fact.
And if you look at human evolution, we didn't evolve under the conditions that kids are raised now.
We evolved under conditions for millions of years until 15 ,000 years ago.
Living in small communities where there were many adults, takes a village to raise a child, the kids were always with the parents.
There was no separation.
Kids were carried everywhere.
They were not put down to let them cry it out.
They were just unconditionally accepted and not punished actually, not hit.
It's a totally a different paradigm of parenting.
That's how we evolved, which means that the human child expects to be treated that way.
When those needs are not met, kids are hurt.
Children have another need, which is we're wired to have certain emotions, you know, along with other mammals.
We're wired to have anger.
Anger is essential for survival.
Fear, we're wired to have fear, we're wired to have curiosity, seeking.
We're wired to have separation, distress, so that if the adults are not around, we should be upset, we should panic, so we cry, so the parents come and get us.
We're wired for play.
And children have this need that when those emotions arise, parents should understand those emotions and not necessarily do what the kid wants them to do, but to understand the child's feelings.
And when children are denied They're kind of understanding.
They think there's something wrong with their emotions.
Then they start telling themselves, I'm too emotional.
I'm not good enough.
I'm too sensitive. I am not loveable.
Or when children don't get the attention that they need, guess what they develop?
They need to be attractive.
So they can attract attention.
Now look at the damage done in this culture by people thinking that they need to meet certain standards of physical looks and the trouble that people go to, it's all because they were not accepted just for who they were.
And now they're trying to attract attention.
Is there a human being on the planet that doesn't have trauma from their childhood?
Yeah, because I'm sitting here listening and it's an interesting conversation because you listen to it both from your experience.
Yeah. And I love that you said, we're not gonna blame mothers.
Yeah. And pain is moving through people.
Yeah. This is why trauma passes through your family and through cultures generationally.
And learning about this helps you understand the responses to your childhood that helped you survive.
And it also helps you feel empowered to take responsibility.
That's right. To change those now subconscious responses that you have. Yeah, so going back to your question about is there anybody on the planet?
Yeah, but in this culture, that would be the exception.
Because there's so many features of this culture that don't meet human needs, that make human life difficult.
Look, in the United States, it's the richest country in history.
70 % of adults are at least on one medication.
40 % of adults are at least on two medications.
More and more kids are getting medicated for all kinds of conditions, from ADHD to self -cutting, to aggression, to so -called oppositionality, to anxiety.
We can look at this two ways, either human beings are just innately troubled or there's something wrong with the environment in which we're raising our kids and in which we're trying to striving to doing our best, but we're facing conditions that are inimical to healthy human development.
So in this sense, when we talk about trauma, We're talking about the conditions under which parents have to function these days.
If I was functioning in a laboratory, trying to grow microorganisms, the word is called culturing.
We're trying to culture organisms, laboratory culture.
If in that laboratory culture, a lot of those microorganisms began to develop pathologies or die off, you have to say this is a toxic culture.
Well, it's the same thing with human beings.
So rather than looking at the source of people's problems strictly within themselves, We have to actually look at the conditions for any creature in the world, whether it's a plant or animal, you have to look at the conditions under which people are living and raising kids and trying to function.
That's what I'm doing here.
I could listen to you all day Dr. Maté.
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We have so much more to cover with Dr. Mate and we're gonna do that after a short break.
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Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins, and you and I are spending time today with the amazing Dr. Gabor Mathe, and we're digging into the topic of how your childhood has shaped who you've become as an adult.
So Dr. Mathe, when you think of childhood trauma, how do you identify it?
Well, again, I mentioned those 10 conditions.
The big T. The big T ones, adding to it poverty and racism.
Those things actually affect the physiology of the body.
So people who are traumatized that way, they have a much higher risk.
For example, people who have had several of those big experiences that I talked about, they have a high risk for autoimmune disease, high risk for cancer, much higher risk for addiction, much higher risk for mental health problems and so on.
This show has listeners in 194 countries.
Sure. And this might be the very first time, as you're listening, that you're actually starting to go, wait a minute.
Everything that he's saying is what I experienced, or at least pieces of it.
I've never considered that this could be trauma.
And we've talked about it as a psychological wound, but I think it'd be really helpful if you also explained how does this create either programming or conditioning in your body that starts to define who you become as an adult and create behaviors that you never intended?
So that happens on both the physiological and the psychological level.
On the physiological level trauma incites inflammation in the body.
So people who are certainly termed as in childhood, you can measure the level of inflammatory particles in their bloodstream.
There'll be abnormally high, which makes them more at risk for cancer, more at risk for autoimmune disease, more at risk for depression, mental health problems, and so on.
That's just a physiological fact.
Trauma can affect the way genes are turned on and off, so genes don't function independently.
There are very few conditions that are purely genetically determined, there are some.
One runs in my family, muscular dystrophy, if you inherit the gene, you'll have the disease, but that's very rare, relatively.
But genes are turned on and off by the environment, so the wrong genes can be turned on and the right genes can be turned off by trauma.
Then, trauma can dysregulate the body's stress mechanism, so people are secreting more cortisol and adrenaline, these are the stress hormones which in the short term are life -saving because if I was threatened or if you were, we would generate cortisol and adrenaline from an adrenal gland.
And we would be stronger and faster and better able to counter the threat either to escape or to fight back.
But in the long term, those same stress hormones, thin the bones, create more clodding in the blood, narrow the blood vessels, elevate the blood pressure as you get hypertension, suppress the immune system, put fat on your belly, creating higher risk for heart disease, makes you depressed.
Also eat your intestines.
These are the stress hormones.
So there's all that on the physiological side, And I could say more about it.
But if you, for example, I mentioned racism.
So if you look at the chromosomal aging of Black people in this country, they age faster than Caucasians.
And Black kids already have higher blood pressure measurements than their Caucasian counterparts.
It's got nothing to do with genetics.
It's got to do with the stress of racism.
A Black woman in this country, the more episodes of racism they experience, the higher the risk for asthma.
Children whose parents are stressed are at high risk for asthma.
This has been known for decades.
I could go on a great length about that, so these are some of the physiological impacts.
Then are the emotional impacts, so, like in my case, being given to a stranger gives me the sense of not being wanted, not being important.
Then I develop behaviors, where I try and prove my importance, so I become a work colleague doctor.
So I drive myself to board. And I don't pay so much attention to my family because I'm out there trying to prove my importance in the world.
Now that has impact on my kids.
That has impact on my marriage.
So there's these behavior, emotional impacts, which result in certain behaviors.
Then we can talk about addictions.
Addictions is a huge consequence of childhood trauma of all kinds and there's all kinds of science behind that.
So one more thing if I may say, when people get the message that their emotions aren't acceptable to the adults, children will push down their feelings you know to be accepted, and they'll try to be nice and cooperative, and they'll try to fit in with other people's expectations, which then means they'll be stressed all the time, which then potentially is all kinds of illness.
You know, I am sitting here thinking about ways in which I can try to distill down what you're saying because the information has been so life -changing for me in my own life to really accept, acknowledge and seek to understand how childhood experiences created a traumatic response inside of me.
And I wanna focus on the, I guess you would call it the smaller T stuff, which is that you have fundamental mental needs as a child, and when they are not provided to you, that it creates trauma inside of you.
And is it fair to say that another way to think about trauma is that it's something happening outside of you that creates this almost like alarm or bracing in your body.
It's like it kind of flips you into that fight or flight because I have this experience of not like going back through my childhood and not like seeing anything that's massive related to my parents, but just having this sense of constantly being on edge, constantly feeling like it's my job to make everybody happy, don't say the wrong thing, this hyper vigilance, and I never knew where it came from.
Yeah, well, the child is very sensitive to the parents' emotional state.
And even if, for example, you can, one of the ways you can tell if a marriage is troubled you can ask the parents or you can measure the child's stress hormone levels.
So the stresses of the parents are directly affecting the child's physiology and the child's psychology.
So you may not have articulated and clearly see what was going on, but especially if you're a sensitive person genetically and that is genetic sensitivity, you'll feel exactly what's going on and you'll think it's all about you.
And then you also develop the belief that it's your job to fix it.
And then when you can't fix it, you'll have to submit a sense of guilt and shame because you failed at your job of making your parents happy, which never should have been the child's job in the first place.
What is a child supposed to do?
About what? Just as you're growing up.
It's interesting because I think so many people, at least in my life and my lived experience, is that that's my job.
to protect myself to make everybody happy too.
But, you see, that's how you survived.
Because what you needed most of all is a relationship with your parents.
And one of the needs of children that I haven't mentioned is what we can call a rest, because in a rest state, we can develop and grow and unfold.
Now, rest means the child doesn't have to work to make their relationship work with the parent.
The relationship is just there.
There's nothing that a child can do to break their relationship.
Now in a situation where that's not the case, then a child necessarily has to work to make the relationship work because without that relationship they know they can't survive.
So that adaptation, the hypervigilance on your part, remember I said in the beginning that nobody's damaged goods.
So that hypervigilance on your part and I believe that it's your job to make the situation peaceful.
That's an adaptation on your part.
So that's a form of trauma.
That's an outcome of trauma.
The problem is that, that becomes them wired into your personality, but children don't have any choice on the matter.
They have to adapt to this situation.
Those adaptations they become wired into their personalities and that's who they think they are.
That's not who they are.
Those are their adaptations.
They're trauma showing up in their behavior and in their emotional functioning.
One of the ways that I've seen people really deny the existence of trauma inside a family is between siblings.
Where two siblings will grow up in the same household and be like, well that never happened or mom wasn't like that or you're just being too sensitive.
In your work, what have you discovered about how siblings can grow up in the same house?
No siblings grow up in the same house.
No siblings have the same parents, no siblings have the same family, no siblings have the same childhood.
why not? There are a whole lot of reasons.
Number one, there's the birth order.
Parents don't relate to the first child the way they relate to the second child.
Then there's gender differences.
Parents don't relate to...
I'm not on with whether the parents love the kids or not.
I'm talking about what actually happens.
The child doesn't experience the parents' love.
The child experiences the way the parents shows up.
So, number one, number two, the A parent's relationship might be in a different phase, one child and another.
The parents might be in a different economic situation.
The parents' lives might be different.
Then each child will evoke a different response from the parent, like with my three kids or your three kids.
But yeah, you have three children.
You have two daughters and a son.
I have two sons and a daughter.
It's not that I loved or we loved any one of them more than the other, but we responded to them differently.
And there's one more factor, which is children born with different temperaments, which is they experience the world differently.
So even if I could be the same parent to all of my kids, which I couldn't be, they'd still have three different parents because they would experience me differently.
Well, you know, I am sitting here listening, again, kind of from two places, one as a mother and one as a human being who was a daughter, who has recognized that there were lots of small things that happened.
And one big thing that created a tremendous, like a traumatic response inside me, that created hyper -vigilance and anxiety and probably ADHD.
And I'm also thinking, and I'm going to share this cause I think it'll be really helpful, that I had a wildly traumatic birth.
I was two weeks overdue.
They had to induce me here in Boston in." And my daughter, Sawyer, who is sitting outside this studio and worked on the Let Them Theory book with me, she did not want to come out.
So it was 36 hours.
They had to use a, forceps didn't work.
They ended up doing a vacuum extraction, and then I tore and I got rushed to emergency surgery and lost two and a half liters of blood.
And they He sent Sawyer home with Chris, they kept me in the hospital and by the time I went home, my skin was as gray as a dolphin.
And I had severe postpartum depression.
And the kind where I could not be alone with her because I was in such a depressive and scary state.
And I was on medications that made it completely unsafe for me to breastfeed her.
I understand. And for the first 10 weeks of her life, I was a zombie on medication.
And oh my God, it just like kills me to think about this.
And she's recently gone into therapy and has started doing EMDR. And one of her visions, when they kind of trace responses to stressful things in the moment and it goes all the way back to the first vision is a vision that she has where she's in her crib, and she really wants me to come, and it's my husband and that it's my mother and that it's my mother -in -law and that it's my friend, Joni, that would sit with me while Chris went to work and I never came.
So we went through the same thing with one of our children, and my wife had a severe post -bondly depression.
She couldn't even look at the kid.
So let me say a couple of things here.
One is that, sometimes birth trauma happens, you know, but yours was severe.
Now birth was created by nature in a certain way.
During the birth process, there are natural hormones that are released both in the mother and the infant.
It's been called a love cocktail.
It's a combination of internal opiates and oxytocin and other brain chemicals which create the bonding between mother and infant.
Now sometimes medical intervention is life -saving and essential.
But we've medicalized births so much that we interfere with it so much now that we're creating a lot of birth trauma where it's not necessary.
I'm not saying that was the case in your situation, but nevertheless we're doing it a lot, you know?
And that interferes with mother and child bonding.
Number one, number two, The child does have this need to stay with the mother's body for many months.
Because the human child is the least developed and the least mature and the most dependent of any mammal.
And the maturation, like a horse can run on the first day of life.
Human beings can't do that for a year and a half.
The horse is a year and a half ahead of us in terms of brain development.
That's because we develop these big brains, these big heads.
If we waited any more than nine months, we'd never get born.
And sometimes even now we barely get born, because their heads get stuck.
Which is probably what happened in your case.
Which means that the development that in other animals happens in the womb, and human beings have to happen on the side of the womb.
That's been called exterogestation.
There's an interogestation in the womb and exterogestation outside the womb.
Now that means the mother's body, the mother's skin, the mother's heartbeat, close to the for many, many, many months.
So when that doesn't happen, and in the US 25 % of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which is a massive abandonment.
But they don't do it because they want to, they have to do it for economic reasons.
It's a massive abandonment of children.
So the soul, there's the birth term and its impacts.
Then there's the mother's depression.
And that is an impact on infants.
and so people, kids whose mothers were depressed, postpartum have a higher risk of ADHD and we can talk about why that's the case.
Why is that the case?
Cause all three of my children have ADHD.
Well, I can tell you what that is.
The first book I ever wrote, Scattered Minds was an ADHD after I was diagnosed and we can talk about that, but let me just say it now.
That's just the case and we can discuss it.
They've done electroencephalograms on six -month -old infants whose mother was depressed and whose mother was not depressed.
You could tell from the EEG of the infant whose mother is depressed and whose is not.
Not because the depressed mother loves the child any less or is any iota less devoted than a non -depressed mother, but because the depressed mother can't respond to the infant with the same smiling, playful, attuned interaction which the child needs for healthy brain development.
It's a sacred thing, and society needs to hold it sacred.
Now how mothers used to develop or raise children is in a community where they gave birth in a community whether it duel us, where, no, mind you, they didn't have the advantages of modern medicine, which again, I'm not dismissing.
I was just talking about how we evolved.
And there was such a thing as aloe muttering, other mothers would come and support the mother.
When the mother needed to rest, other women would come and hold the baby.
And mothers are left very much on their own in this society and that depression in the mother then affects the child's brain, at all, And not only that, given that we develop a sense of ourselves based on how the adults look at us.
When the mother or their parents can't look at the child or they can't hold the child.
Again, the child begins to feel there's something wrong with them.
It feels like there's a million ways for this to actually happen.
Well, there is. And I share the story because it's true.
I was a completely different mother when I gave birth to our second child, Kendall.
Just 19 months later.
Yeah. and Chris and I were different.
And so, I can see how without any ill intention, you are a very different parent.
Absolutely. And the child is a very different child.
And the child is one of the different temperament.
Correct. So they experience it differently to start with.
So how do you, like how does this sort of unresolved trauma from childhood that I would imagine, you know, A lot of us learn about this as an adult, and then we start to recognize that this is an explanation for a lot of the patterns of behavior that you don't really like but you're not quite sure how to get control of them.
How does unresolved trauma impact the way that you deal with stress as an adult?
So the body's stress regulation apparatus, which is physiological.
It has to do with the connection between certain brain centers onto the adrenal gland, which is the stress gland you might say.
No child is born with stress regulation, infants don't know how to regulate their stresses.
Well neither do adults.
Well as you say in your book, most adults are eight years old, if that, but I thought I was pretty generous.
This might have been three or four years old.
Well, stress regulation, like other functions, has to develop so that when something stressful happens, is I know how to face it without being overwhelmed.
And that depends on the development of these brain circuits and receptors for brain chemicals.
Now trauma interferes with the development of the body's stress regulation apparatus so that we become adults and we don't know how to handle stress.
And then we seek escape.
So one of the ways that people escape from stress is addictive behaviors.
For example, if you talk about or talk to addicts, I feel like I have my own addictive behaviors.
Even if I go quote unquote sober for a while and then I relapse, what usually happened is that I got stressed.
And then I reach for that addictive outlet as a way of soothing my stress.
So that's how it shows up, but physiologically it shows up by a dysregulation of the body's stress regulation apparatus.
So it's not just psychological.
We're talking physiology.
you have done studies in laboratory animals where the way the mother handles that infant rat pup in the first few days of life will have an impact on the adult rat's capacity to handle stress.
And if you take the rats, by the way, whose mothers don't hold one as well, and you put them with mothers who do, their brains develop normally, so it's not a genetic effect.
It's what's called an epigenetic effect.
It's the environment acting on the genes.
Which is why we come back to your original point.
No human being has damaged goods.
No. The good news is that if you can recognize that your response to stress and traumatic situations and overwhelming emotional situations is something that you can identify and change.
Yeah. That that's what the opportunity is here in terms of being able to heal and resolve Absolutely, and especially if you begin by recognizing that it's not your fault, there's nothing wrong with you.
You know, when I think about my husband who absolutely experienced trauma by having a dad that was a workaholic and never around and narcissistic personality style and lots of drinking and stress in the marriage, right?
And his response to stress is to just shut down.
Yeah. The man goes silent and stoic and in our marriage, one of the things that have come up a lot, which you can direct line to his response to his own childhood is he doesn't really know what his needs are because they weren't met.
That's right. And for him, it took a long time to call that trauma from his childhood because he's like, well, I had food, my parents were there.
I went to school. It's not like they beat me and for me, I am the opposite.
I'm a reactor, I'm a human volcano. And when I get dysregulated or triggered or upset or overwhelmed, I'm like, ah!
And it's, even though I know this, and I've been working on it and I am a completely different human being, I feel that way over the last three years.
Yeah. I still erupt.
Well, join a club. And, so, how do you personally navigate your daily challenges and when you get overwhelmed by stress?
So, let me say something about Chris first, if I may.
Yes, please. When he says that I wasn't beaten or if you weren't starving, I had food, and therefore, I wasn't traumatized.
Here's what I would say to him.
So listen, Chris, let's take one of your kids, and let's say you were an alcoholic.
Which means that you came home in different moods all the time, and the kids couldn't rely on who dad was going to be for one minute to the next, and your mom was constantly stressed.
And if you were this way, do you think your kids wouldn't be hurt by that?
So just plug your kid into the situation that you're in, you see how, and if you're one of your kids came to you and said, dad, I don't like it that you're drinking thinking and you're behaving this way or that way and you're a work hard like a never around, would you say to your kid, well, there's food on the table.
What are you complaining about?
No, but I did. No, that happened in our house like, Okay.
15 years ago. Okay.
And he felt bad and I was an asshole.
Oh. Okay. Again, more trauma and more pain passing on to our kids.
Yeah, I'm just saying that when people look at their own childhoods, they kind of minimize.
Why do we do that? Because it was too painful to accept in the first place, so that people dissociate, and they disconnect from their bodies and their feelings.
Now you said that he had a hard time feeling what it feels.
That itself is a trauma impact.
It's a protection. It's not a flaw.
It's not a damage. It's an adaptation.
If I was hurting you right now, and you couldn't escape, and you couldn't fight back, and you couldn't ask for help, then dissociating and not experiencing your feelings would be your only protection.
But then it gets wired into you and then all your life you go through not knowing what you feel and not knowing what your needs are.
So again, it's an adaptation.
That's what I'm saying.
Is that nobody's damaged goods.
These are just adaptations.
The abnormalities are not an individual.
It's in the circumstances to which the individual had to respond that way.
So that his response are yours or mine for that matter.
We're perfectly normal responses to abnormal circumstances.
I say abnormal in the sense, circumstances that did not meet human needs.
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So stay with us. Welcome back.
It's your friend Mel Robbins.
And today, you and I are getting to spend time with the extraordinary Dr. Gabor Mate.
Dr. Matte, one of the things that's coming to mind is thinking back to my own life and the moment where I first bumped into your work and I learned that the seemingly little things created a lasting impact and that even though I wasn't to blame for the emotional and all the emotional volatility or the emotional shutdown in my parents when I was growing up, that it impacted me, it was real and it was my responsibility to heal and to decide whether or not I wanted to do the work to change the way that it impacted me.
Because it did have a massive impact on my behaviors, constantly feeling on edge, people pleasing, anxiety, ADHD, drinking too much, chasing success as a way to prove that I was worthy of something and to make other people happy.
It was everywhere. It honestly just defined how I ran on default.
And I remember the moment though, when I started to truly accept the fact that these were all indications of trauma.
And that if I wanted my life to feel different, Yeah.
That I needed to lean in to everything that you're saying.
Yeah. And I felt a lot of conflict about that moment because I felt guilty for identifying it that way because I know my parents were just doing the best that they did.
They did. And that there was a lot that I didn't remember.
Yeah. And I'm wondering if you could just talk to the person who's listening, who is having that awakening for the first time, where they're really accepting that some of the behaviors and the negative self -talk and the anxiety, that this is a result of experiences that you had as a child where you were not given the things that you needed.
Now there's a lot on what you said.
Okay, first it says you behave that way by default.
There's a difference between default and fault.
Hmm. Okay, default, you didn't know you were doing it, you didn't know any better.
You were just following patterns that you're programming to you, but it's not your fault, okay?
There's a huge difference, important distinction.
Number one. Number two.
It's never the child's job to make the parents happy, or to create peace in the family, and the child invariably fails, which instills a huge sense of guilt and inadequacy for not having fulfilled a task that never should have been yours in the first place.
It's a reversal of roles, because whose job it is to hold who emotionally, to create peace.
And so when a child is forced into that position, again, as an adaptation, the main thing in our relationship with the parents, she's given an impossible task that she's bound to fail at and bound to feel shame over it, which means that any shame and guilt that you feel is completely undeserved.
When we start noticing these patterns we can start asking ourselves questions, but it depends on how we ask them.
So I could say, why am I behaving this way?
Or is that a question?
No, it's an indictment.
It's an indictment.
But I said, hmm, I wonder why I'm behaving that way.
So we need to begin to develop that compassionate curiosity towards the self where we start looking not too wide, not this indictment as you say, but genuine curiosity.
And from that perspective everything, pretty much everything anybody thinks is wrong with them is actually because it's an adaptation or it begins as a failure of development because the conditions for development were not adequate.
And so then we can understand.
Now, it's not a question of being victims. That's the last thing we want to do is to foster victim mentality.
They did this to me and now I can't help it.
No. That happened and it's your responsibility.
And it's your capacity to change that now.
So you have to drop the victim mode altogether, but that doesn't mean that we don't recognize what happened.
So to say that stuff happened to you, and I get the sense that something big happened that you haven't articulated it yet, but something big happened to you at some point, to recognize that is not to say that you're a victim.
It's just to say that whatever happened had certain impacts and fostered certain adaptations on your part that made you behave and undermine your development, and certainly, I'll share with you.
When I was in the fourth grade, I woke up in the middle of the night on a family vacation and an older kid was on top of me.
All right. And that had massive implications on my life.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
I was fourth grade.
Yeah. And I was sound asleep so I was in a safe space.
Wake up to an older kid on top of me who was fondling me.
Okay. And in the scheme of things that can happen, here I go dismissing it.
You're looking at me, you're like, no, no, no. Don't go there.
Okay, okay. Okay, but it's almost like I'm shaming myself I'm all for having drama about this.
No, can I unpack this for you a little bit?
Sure. Are you open to it?
Oh, I'm so open to it, yeah.
Okay. Here's the question I'm gonna ask you.
Okay. How did you feel when this happened?
I felt very confused and scared.
Confused and scared, good enough.
Who did you speak to about it?
No one. Okay. Now, if something like this happened to one of your daughters, was it great for her?
Yeah. Okay, if one of these things happened to Sawyer or Kendall in grade four.
And if they didn't talk to you, how would you explain that?
I'd feel, how would I explain it?
I would explain it, and I'm about to go intellectual, I personally, as the mother would feel heartbroken.
I understand how you'd feel, but really I'm not asking how you'd feel.
Okay, so - I'm asking how you'd explain it.
Why wasn't my daughter talking to me about feeling scared and confused and violated?
Why shouldn't - Because she didn't feel safe talking to me.
That's the trauma. The trauma began before that happened.
Cause if he had been able to talk to your parents and they would have said, this is awful.
You must feel terrible.
Come here, let me hold you.
And let's deal with the situation.
So the trauma is not only in what happened, is that you were so alone that that happened.
And that aloneness was yours before this traumatic event ever occurred.
As a matter of fact, abusers can tell with almost laser like accuracy who was defended and protected and who was not, who can be victimized and who cannot.
So that your primary traumatic event was not this event.
Not that this wasn't traumatic, of course it was hugely traumatic, but it became hugely traumatic because you are alone, and that sense of lack of safety and and and lack of protection, furthermore, you may not even have wanted to bother your parents because they're already stressed enough already.
You're protecting them.
That's the primary traumatic situation.
I've never looked at it like that.
Yeah, do you see that one?
Oh, a thousand percent.
And I can also see when I think about experiences that friends have shared with me where they did say something, and then there was denial.
There was dismissal.
Or dismissal, or we're not gonna tell anybody, or this stays within us.
Or even if they then go after the person and confront it, it blows up and somehow you're to blame.
And so I can see how...
That's right. And of course, when you shove it down, you then think you've done something wrong.
And that was the other thing that happened for me is that I felt like I had done something wrong.
That's one of the impacts of trauma is the shameless view of the self.
There's people start blaming themselves that somehow you invited it or deserved it or you didn't fight back hard enough, which if you didn't was also self protection.
Well, I think that was one of the original moments that at least that I remember where I literally left my body and disassociated.
Which was the defense.
Yes. So again, it's an adaptation.
So that's what I would say about that incident.
It makes perfect sense.
Yeah, but again the problem is in the environment and in the lack of being held and being seen.
So there's nothing in your initial impulse when you began a narrative about how it's not as bad as what happened.
Right, right, right.
Would you say that to your great - Oh my God, no. If your daughter comes to you and says, it's not so bad, I think of all the kids that are being beaten.
So the lack of self -compassion is one of the ways that trauma shows up.
And that's what I'm saying.
The healing needs to begin with some compassionate curiosity towards the self.
of not why, but why.
It's a totally different conversation.
And then I can also see and take responsibility and have a lot of compassion for how my volatility emotionally Absolutely.
Just pass that on to my daughters.
Absolutely. And so there are things that happen to them that in the time, they didn't feel comfortable coming to me.
Yeah. Because the exact same thing.
Exactly. Exactly. And you know, of course it just makes me, it makes me sad that I didn't know this sooner.
But I feel very grateful for your work because I know it now.
And so do our children, and so does my husband, and that knowledge gives you the ability to truly address the things that happened and the response that happened in your body and how that has created these default patterns and this inability to manage stress or emotion or conflict in a way that is healthy and that keeps you connected to yourself instead of constantly abandoning yourself and feeling disappointed in yourself and shaming yourself.
And so while I can reflect on that with a lot of sadness and grief and regret, I feel more empowered, honestly...
Well, that's the whole point.
...about what's possible.
That's the whole point, is that we all want to be free, but as long as we're running in default mode and we're just reacting to stuff, there's no freedom in it.
We're actually like puppets on a string.
And if you remember Pinocchio, you know, when he becomes a real boy, he says, how silly, how foolish I was when I was a puppet, but where we're all puppets in that sense.
As long as these traumatic impacts are running our lives we're puppets on the string and those strings are unconscious.
So it's the whole thing about becoming really free.
And that real freedom depends on looking at how it was and getting in touch with our capacity to take responsibility now.
You know, so what really, the work is for all of us is how to become free so it can be in the present moment connected to ourselves.
there's the great trauma psychologist, Peter Levine says, no longer living under the tyranny of the past. And it's totally available.
It's totally possible.
It is totally possible.
And it's possible for you, it's possible for your children, it's possible for anybody that you know and love.
It's possible for your parents if they accept the invitation to look at themselves.
If they choose it, yeah.
Yes, what is the first step?
Is it asking the question like why?
like just being curious with a level of compassion, like why am I like this?
Because if I reflect on your question, that's what happened for me.
I started to say to myself, it's no longer tolerable for me to operate like this.
I don't want to be this person.
I don't wanna feel like this.
I don't want to feel disconnected from other people.
I don't wanna have this level of anger inside me.
So that's actually the first step is to recognize one's suffering rather than taking it for granted, which incidentally is the Buddha's first teaching is that life is dukkha, life is being suffering, you know?
And then, the second question is, okay, why?
You know, so it does begin with recognizing the suffering, rather than denying it and running away from it.
And there's many ways to run away from our pain, through certain behaviors and addictions, and the point is stop running from your pain, accept that it's there and be curious about it without blaming yourself for it.
So those are the first steps.
And then you ask for help.
I mean, if help is available, we are born seeking help.
You've never met a one -day -old infant who doesn't know how to ask for help.
But let me ask you a question.
How easy has it been going back for you to ask for help?
You mean, if I think about when I was in fourth grade?
I'm then, and even decades later, can you ask for help, or is that a challenge for you?
Well, I asked for a lot of help now.
No, I don't mean now, I mean before your transformation.
Absolutely, like when you just said that I had this epiphany, that I've always felt like I gotta do it myself.
Exactly. I've always felt like it's on me, I've always felt like, I'll just take this on.
I'll just do this. Which is an adaptation because there was no help available.
You know what's interesting?
Sorry, go ahead. Is you just said there's no help available and I felt this knee jerk need?
Yeah, to protect your parents.
Yes. I understand. Because I do know, I mean, I know my mom well enough to know that she would have picked up a shovel and probably clocked the kid in the next week.
Yeah. Yeah, that's not what you needed your mother to do.
You need any mother to say, oh, Jesus, that's awful, come here, let's talk about it.
You're born born, not knowing God's how to ask for help.
You were born with the supreme capacity to ask for help.
I mean, as we know, any infant knows how to ask for help.
So something educates it out of us.
Something compels us to suppress a capacity to seek help.
So if the first step is recognizing our suffering And the second step is getting curious about it.
And the third step is, I need some help here.
It's beautiful. Well, it's only the simple truth.
It is so simple when you lay it out like that.
Yeah. And it's also so freeing.
Yeah. One of the things that you write about that I think is so important that I would love to have you explain is this idea that we are naturally wired and have a fundamental need for joyfulness, playfulness, creativity, and that we sacrifice that.
Can you talk more about that?
So there's a book written by a palliative care nurse in Australia and I used to work in palliative care and it's called the Top 5 Regrets of Dying People and she's talking to people who die before their time, you know, from cancer usually.
One of the regrets is that they worked or I didn't play enough.
Playfulness is built into our brains.
All mammals play. Bear cubs play.
Lion cubs play. Puppies, kittens.
We're wired for play.
Why? Because play is essential for a number of things.
One is essential for brain development.
It's much more important for brain development than academic learning.
I'm talking about scientifically, brain physiologically.
So play is important.
Play is also important to form relationships.
Because in play, you can kind of rough house a bit, but you're not actually being enemies.
So you're making friends that way.
So play is essential.
We're the Pooh, which is one of my all -time favorite books.
Why is it one of your all -time favorite books?
Well, it's so playful.
But at the very end, and I know you married to Chris Robbins, which is Christopher Robin.
you know, just anyway, there's a passage at the end of the book.
We're not the poo, where Christopher, the boy, by the way, him and his father had a terrible relationship, which is a whole other issue.
I'm talking about the real Christopher Robin.
But the fictional Christopher Robin is now growing up and he has to go to school, which means he won't be able to play with his animals anymore.
And he's trying to explain this to these animals, including Winnie the Bear.
And the book ends with the statement that I'll paraphrase where it says, They go off walking together hand in hand.
And the book ends with, But whatever they do, and wherever they go in the enchanted forest, A little boy in his bare -wall will be playing together.
And that passage as an adult would bring me to tears because as a kid, as an infant I wasn't played with.
My mother was way too terrorized and depressed to play with me.
And, kids, peek -a -boo, play starts so early, it's essential for mental health, it's essential for a brain development.
So there's poor people who were looking back on their lives and saying, I wish I had played more, play is just essential.
And I have to say that one of the things that is kept our marriage going 55 years now is that we play so well together, and we're just playing all the time.
When we're not fighting, which, by the way, is long gone.
Not long gone, but gone.
Play is just essential.
And you weren't played with.
So did you play with your kids?
It's interesting. I have two brothers.
They're both intuitively playful with young kids.
They just know how to be with them, how to pretend, how to just get into their space.
I watch them and I don't know how the hell they do it.
Because I didn't know how to play with my kids.
Not really. I kind of faked it, but I always kept waiting for them to develop minds that I could engage with verbally.
On that verbal level, I'm very comfortable.
On the play level, I wasn't.
I was rather stiff.
I wish I was a grandfather, and not yet, because I learned how to play.
I'd let that infant teach me how to play, but, no, I didn't know how to play.
I didn't know how to play.
I really lacked that because it wasn't given to me when I was small.
My brothers had it.
They grew up under very different circumstances.
They didn't have the same parents.
And the way we talked about it, so they know how to play.
But kids, I mean. Well, a very surprising insight for me as I've been working to resolve issues from my past is noticing that I'm a very warm person, but I'm not affectionate.
And it's this epiphany of going in more for the hug, being more physical in terms of embracing my kids.
And it's something that I definitely did not receive.
And I come from a long line of farmers and hard workers and pull up your big girl panties and let's move on.
And that's the way that my mom is, even though she's warm and amazing and loving, but not physically embracing.
And so I really relate to that because it's something as an adult that I recognize that I truly want to change.
And it takes effort.
It takes effort for me to go, oh, I noticed I'm just standing here.
I've got to put my arm around.
Just count to five.
That's true. And then hug somebody.
I used to be a hugphobic.
And I embraced you when you walked in.
Yeah, you did. But I honestly think how people in the room would start hugging each other like this.
And is that a response?
It's a response to really not being held.
And it's also kind of a protective shell.
I don't wanna make myself that vulnerable.
I don't wanna open up, you know.
What might be some surprising adult behaviors that are an indication of unresolved trauma from your childhood?
Well sometimes it's attributes and behaviors that the world respects you for.
So great success can sometimes be an outcome with childhood trauma, because you're working so hard to prove something to the world.
Like I talked about my own work autism.
And because I had to prove that it was important.
Now, that made me a very successful also a respected physician from the outside and inside, different story.
In my family, a different situation altogether, people are very attractive, you know, put a lot of effort into being very attractive.
The world admires them, but it's very often, like I said before, they're trying to attract the attention.
They should have been their birthright, and they They don't feel good if they're not attractive." And you see this.
As people age, there's desperation to keep looking young because they're not acceptable the way they are.
So, it sometimes it shows up in success and what the world considers success.
And other ways, you talked about not being the kind of person that is open to hugging or my husband shuts down.
Well, my response to a sense of, hmm, disruption in my relationship with my wife is to shut down.
So I just, you know, go sullen and non -communicative.
I mean, they talk about it in the first chapter of the book, this is, you know, I arrive home from a speaking trip and she texts me that she hasn't left home yet to pick me up from the airplane.
And I go into sullen withdrawal stage because I'm reliving my abandonment unconsciously, but I don't realize it.
And when I saw my mother again after that five or six week separation, I didn't even look at her for several days, which is the typical response of the child because the child's brain says you were so hurt when you're abandoned that you will not open yourself up again.
Mmm. So your husband is exhibiting the same thing that had been a very dominant problem in my relationship with my marriage.
Is my tendency to shut down in response to any sense of hurt, even if the hurt has nothing to do with the present moment.
But it's a re -triggering of some old wound.
You're so amazing. What are your parting words?
You know what comes up for me?
It's a beautiful movie.
with Robin Williams and Matt Damon, Where - Good Will Hunting.
Good Will Hunting. Here in Boston.
Yeah, that's right.
Where the psychologist Robin Williams grabs this very dysfunctional, dysregulated client paid by Matt Damon, and he says, it's not your fault.
If you can only get that, that's the biggest takeaway, I would say.
Just get it. It's not your fault, but there's reason for it.
It can be worked through.
Well, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here, for sharing all of your wisdom and your research and for not only validating our experience, but giving us three simple things we can do to reconnect with ourselves and truly take our power back.
You're amazing. My pleasure, thank you.
You're welcome. Oh, and I also want to take a moment and thank you, thank you for choosing to listen to this episode, thank you for sharing this with people that you love.
And thank you for taking everything that you've learned today very seriously and trying these steps that Dr. Maté have given to you because you deserve to reconnect with yourself, you deserve to be happy, you deserve to have a different experience of life, and there is no doubt in my mind that everything you learn today is going to help you and the people that you love do exactly that.
And in case no one else tells you that I want to be sure to tell you that I love you.
I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life and understanding how your childhood has impacted who you've become and taking responsibility for who you want to become next.
Everything you learn today is going to help you do that.
Alrighty, I'll be waiting for you in the very next episode.
I can't believe you're here.
I really can't. Okay, get over it.
I got a word that's like, okay, completely screwed up my kids.
It didn't mean to. Kids whose mothers were depressed postpartum have a higher risk of ADHD.
and we can talk about why that's the case.
Why is that the case?
Because all three of my children have ADHD.
Yeah. I still erupt.
Well, join a club. I still need to go to the bathroom now that you've said it, my body's like, hat after pee.
Absolutely. You're fantastic.
I'm trying not to interrupt you.
Sometimes I just go on because these topics are so so passionate about the stuff.
Of course, are you doing fantastic?
I used to be an English teacher.
You did? Oh, I would have probably failed your class.
Oh, wow. Okay. I used to be hugphobic.
And I embraced you when you walked in.
Yeah, you did. Oh, and one more thing.
And, no, this is not a blooper.
This is the legal language.
You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you.
This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.
I'm just your friend.
I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.
Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
