#738: Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. BJ Miller｜The Tim Ferriss Show

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Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs.

This is Tim Ferris.

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show,

where it is my job to sit down

with world-class performers from every field imaginable

to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,

and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

This episode is a two for one.

And that's because the podcast recently hit

its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about,

and past one billion downloads.

To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best,

some of my favorites,

from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.

I could not be more excited

to give you these super combo episodes.

And internally we've been calling these

the super combo episodes,

because my goal is to encourage you to yes,

enjoy the household names, the super famous folks,

but to also introduce you to lesser known people,

I consider stars.

These are people who have transformed my life,

and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.

Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle.

Perhaps you missed an episode.

Just trust me on this one.

We went to great pains to put these pairings together.

And for the bios of all guests,

you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo.

And now, without further ado, please enjoy,

and thank you for listening.

First up, Dr. Gabor Mate,

Twitter at Dr. Gabor Mate,

and Dr. Gabor Mate.com.

Gabor is an addiction and trauma expert,

and bestselling author of,

in the realm of hungry ghosts,

when the body says no.

And that's that I hated,

which of course means I'm hating a part of myself.

And that included anger, rage responses,

use of stimulants, you name it.

I always applied this loving kindness meditation

to other people.

And what was recommended is that I apply that loving kindness

to the younger Tim, to the other versions of Tim,

who had these behaviors that I had grown to hate and resent,

and to actually thank them for the role they played.

For instance, that rage, that anger,

was the fuel that got me out of Long Island.

I just love to hear,

and we can take it anywhere we want, of course.

But once you have shifted the focus

from why the addiction to why the pain,

and you start to work with someone,

what approaches have you found to help?

What tools?

I call it compassionate inquiry.

So inquiring in a compassionate way.

Not why did I do this, but,

why did I do this?

Right.

The first one is not a question.

It's a statement.

It's a self-condemnation.

The second one is a question.

I wonder why I did this.

Ah, it's with my pain.

And so what your friends said that it served you.

So thank it.

Love it.

But let go of it.

It's absolutely right.

I call it the stupid friend.

The stupid friend is the one who helped you

in a particular way at a certain time,

but it can't learn that that way doesn't function anymore.

Right.

It's helping.

Now it's hurting.

So it's a friend, because it's really trying to help,

but it's stupid, because it's not learning

that you're no longer that three-year-old,

that that five-year-old, that 15-year-old.

You know?

So now this leads to the question of trauma,

because it's one thing to recognize

that all this originates in childhood pain,

it's quite another to transform that pain.

And for that, we have to understand what trauma is.

So people often think that trauma is what happens to you.

So trauma is a divorce when you were small

and your parents fighting trauma is your mother's depression,

trauma is your father's alcoholism,

trauma is your parents' argumentation,

trauma is physical or sexual abuse or some loss.

Those aren't the traumas.

Those are traumatic, but the trauma is not what happens to you.

The trauma is what happens inside you.

And as a result of these traumatic events,

what happens inside you is you get disconnected

from your emotions and you disconnect it from your body.

And you have difficulty being in the present moment

and you develop a negative view of your world

and a negative view of yourself

and a defensive view of other people.

And these perspectives keep showing up in your life

in the present, because they're the stupid friends.

And so the issue is not just to recognize what happened

at 10, 15, 30, however many years ago,

but to actually recognize their manifestations

in the present moment and to transcend them

and how do you do that by reconnecting with yourself,

by restoring the connection with your body primarily

and with your emotions that you lost.

And once you do, when you found these things again,

then you have what we call recovery,

because what does it mean to recover something?

It means to find it again.

So what does it that people find when they recover

to define themselves and the loss of self

is the essence of trauma.

So the real purpose of addiction,

treatment, mental health, treatment,

any kind of healing is a reconnection.

For people who are listening and want to reconnect

with themselves, with their bodies, for instance,

what recommendations might you have,

whether that's things they can do or resources,

they can look to or both or something else,

what recommendations.

So I'm sure I am 100% sure,

because I've had people come on

and for the very first time on this podcast talk about

sexual abuse of the endurance as children

and what they did to help recover from that.

Many people listening, I am sure,

have addictions, both traumatic past experiences

and trauma.

What recommendations could you make for them?

So I want to say first of all that for trauma,

you don't need terribly traumatic events.

So there's two ways to look at trauma.

One is that bad things happen that shouldn't have.

We've talked about those.

But the other way to get traumatized

is when good things happen that should have happened.

Good things didn't happen that should have happened.

Look at the trauma of a mission.

Trauma of a mission with a parents,

not that they didn't love you,

not that they didn't do their best,

but they were too stressed,

traumatized, distracted themselves.

Then you didn't get the kind of attention

and the kind of acceptance and the kind of attuned

being with that you needed.

That itself can make you disconnect from yourself.

The child needs that acceptance, that connection,

that attunement, our brain development requires it,

our emotional development demands it.

And when we don't get it,

not because the parents don't love us,

but simply because of their own issues,

we can also suffer that disconnection.

So that's what I call developmental trauma.

Now how do we connect?

Well, there are many, many forms of therapy.

It's very difficult for anybody to do this on their own.

Some people do it.

I certainly couldn't do it on my own.

I've needed a lot of help in terms of therapy

that helps you understand what happened to me.

And so that there's a reason for it.

So that, if there's a reason for it,

then it's no longer me.

I'm not somebody to be ashamed of.

I'm just somebody who developed

along certain lines for some very good reasons.

But it's not in my deepest character

and it's not who I am

and I don't have to be that way.

That's a relief to know.

It's also not that I'm generically programmed,

so I'm doomed to stay that way.

Number one, number two, you have to reconnect with the body.

There are various body therapies,

my friend Peter Levine and his somatic experiencing.

Walking tiger?

Is that one of those?

Waking the tiger.

Waking the tiger was his first book

and he's written many wonderful books since then.

So somatic experiencing, his method is called,

which he developed, brilliant.

There is EMDR, eye movement, desensitization, reprogramming,

which is a way of bypassing the conscious mind

and getting to the emotional brain

and quicker than talk therapy by itself can do.

So it's combined with talk therapy,

but it takes you past just a conscious defensive,

egoic mind.

There is emotional freedom tapping that people do.

There's various variations on that.

There is motor sensory integration techniques.

Then there is the traditional therapies like yoga.

No yoga was not simply a physical modality

when it first developed.

Yoga actually means unity.

So the variations of yoga is to regain that unity,

not just with ourselves,

but also with the larger creation.

And so yoga, when it's practiced in its intended way,

not just the hot yoga, where you get to go to work out,

that's great.

I'm not against it,

but I'm talking about intentional yoga

with a meditative aspect to it,

which is taught by a number of disciplines,

body work of all kinds.

Just gonna hit pause for one second.

Do you practice yoga and if so, what type do you practice?

So I've always said with my ADHD,

I'm not a yoga person, I can't do it.

Until you're not half a go,

I met actually a yogi.

His name is Sat Guru.

He's an Indian yogi with a big following.

I was very skeptical, but I met the guy.

I now have a 50 minute daily yoga practice,

which I did this morning before coming to the end to you.

And this made an enormous difference in my life.

With my ADHD mind, I really have trouble just sitting there.

When I sit on the meditation cushion,

my mind is like all over the place.

But with the yoga, which is more body-based,

I can stay much more present.

There is a meditational component to it.

And so the answer is yes, if you asked me 18 months ago,

I would have said no, I supported, but I don't do it.

But now I'm actually a very committed practitioner.

And it really has made a difference.

Is it a particular type of yoga that people could

Google or learn more about?

So I'm not a yoga expert.

And as many forms of yoga that other people,

more knowledgeable than I am, could recommend.

But the one I learned is called inner engineering.

And it's taught by either Sadhguru or his followers.

And you can look up inner engineering online.

In your engineering.

When I recommend it to friends and others,

everybody's been only being grateful.

So I can highly recommend it.

Typically, there's to me what seems to be a cult

around the guy, which I don't take too particularly,

but he's the genuine article in terms of

having a deep experience and being able to transmit

that experience to others.

And creating a practical system around it.

So it's worked for me.

I'm not here to recruit anybody else,

but since you're asking.

No, no, it's just my fans appreciate.

Yeah. Well, you know, I'm not going to blame it

on my fans. I like specifics.

Yeah. So it's an inner engineering.

You can look up online and it's taught here in the States,

and in Canada, internationally, actually.

But I did interrupt you.

You're about to mention, I think, another technique

or modality that can help talk about, for instance,

the somatic experience EMDR emotional freedom tapping,

motor-centric integration technique or techniques yoga,

and then there's something coming up after that.

Well, about 10 years ago, I began to work with psychedelics.

Now, if you're 15 years ago, you were to ask me,

will I ever be working with psychedelics

as a healing modality?

I would have said, you're out of your mind.

But then, to a series of events, I became aware of the

potential role of psychedelics in healing.

And I've been doing work with them for 10 years.

And they're another potent method.

They're not for everybody.

And I have to emphasize that whatever modality you choose

of a psychedelic nature, you have to do it with

adept practitioners with deep integrity and deep knowledge

and experience.

But in such hands and in such a context,

it can be like a super high-weight self-awareness.

Not in isolation, but it opens doors.

Otherwise, might take years.

And so it's not unusual for me to conduct the psychedelic

session with somebody or a series of sessions,

either in a group or individual setting,

and have them say, that was like 10 years of psychotherapy

in one day.

And I've had the same experience myself.

So, again, it's not to be isolated from other kinds of work.

And it has to be integrated.

But it's not a potent way of working.

And of course, as I know, your personally,

where there's an increasing movement amongst psychologists,

therapists, psychiatrists, medical doctors,

other healers to find ways of incorporating

psychedelic healing in the larger therapeutic scheme.

So, Godmore, you mentioned a series of events leading you

to psychedelics or to consider psychedelics,

potentially, as a healing or medical modality.

If you're able to, could you describe any of those events?

Sure.

So, in 2008, my book on addiction in the realm of

Hungry Ghosts, Close and Converse with Addiction,

was published in Canada and very quickly became a number one

national bestseller, subsequently published in the States

as well.

And I was in a book tour.

And people could ask me, what do you know about addictions

and ayahuasca as a treatment?

Ayahuasca being a proven, or Amazonian,

vine that's made into a brew that has psychedelic properties

and you're nothing.

The next speech, the next event, somebody also asked,

what do you know about ayahuasca into addiction?

I finally started getting annoyed with it.

Like, leave me alone.

I've used to read in the book, I've spent years researching it.

My life experience and all kinds of scientific exploration

went into it.

Ask me about something I know about.

And then I realized that maybe the universe was knocking

on my door.

And somebody said, did you know you could experience it here

in Vancouver?

There was a proven shaman leading some ceremonies up in Vancouver.

So who might have said no?

And I jumped right in and I sat in this tent

with 50 other people.

50.

Yeah, it was that's how they set it up.

It's not what I recommend, but that's how they set it up.

They played beautiful music.

And there was a little baby in the room.

Mother and dad were, therefore, the experience,

the baby was in the room and the baby was cooling away.

And tears started flowing down my face.

And these were not tears of sorrow.

There were tears of joy.

And I got in touch with such profound love

that I had never consciously experienced before.

And there were tears of love.

And it wasn't love for anybody in particular.

It was just love.

And then I saw in all the ways that I had closed my heart

against love in my life.

And how it betrayed love in my personal relationship

with my spouse and my children and in other ways.

So I just got this experience of love

as something profound and universal and life defining,

but something from I just been cut off in so many ways.

And I got it because I closed my heart against love

precisely because when I was vulnerable and small,

I'd been so hurt going to my mother's States of mind.

She couldn't respond to me.

I needed to be responded to not her fault, but she couldn't.

And then when I was a year old, she gave me to a stranger

to save my life.

And I didn't see her for a month, which is a huge explain

that for a second.

So again, this Buddha-Pershtungry, Second World War, January,

the Russians are circled Buddha-Pasht and are fighting

the Germans.

The government in power is a right-wing, fascist,

anti-Semitic military force.

And even though the deportations of Jews

had stopped, the Germans had annihilated

half a million Hungarian Jews in three or four months,

but now the Hungarian fascist for killing Jews in Buddha-Pasht.

And including in the house where my mother and her living.

So my mother gave me to a stranger in the street

a Christian woman, but she didn't know

she'd be there to her life next day.

Well, or that I would be.

And that was quite sick.

So I didn't see her for a month, which I experienced

as a deep abandonment.

How else could I experience it?

So my heart closed this against love.

And I got all this.

And so I got that if this plant that, as you say,

manifests the mind, can show me both the ways in which I've

closed the off from myself and that I don't need to,

because the love is still there.

What healing potential it has.

Now, I wish I could say that after that experience,

I became a loving husband and a loving human being.

I didn't.

It's not that simple, you know, as my wife could tell you.

Nevertheless, they'd opened the door for me.

And I got right away.

Now, however the thought that I had was that I had no induction,

I had no introduction.

I had no processing afterwards.

Ayahuasca is a medicinal plant that has been used

in the Amazon basin for hundreds of years,

maybe longer in its cultural context.

In a tribe, in a village where people know each other,

where they know the shaman, where they share the same assumptions

and the same history.

That's not the same as a bunch of Western engineers.

A lot of learning involved.

We made mistakes, but it evolved.

And the essence of it is that people don't come to it cold.

They come into the preparation in a safe setting,

where pretty soon a group becomes a family to each other,

which means that not only do they love each other

and support each other, but they also trigger each other.

I mean, basically I tell people, guess what?

You're back and you found your virgin.

And everything you've heard about your virgin

is going to show up here.

But in the context, we're safe for that to happen.

Right.

And so I've seen a lot of great healing.

I've had people with multiple suicide attempts,

heal from depression.

I've seen people get much better with their autoimmune diseases.

I've seen people deal with all kinds of addictions

and life issues, relationship problems,

come out of it much more themselves,

much more able to deal with these issues

so long as the proper integration is done afterwards.

So that was my personal experience.

Well, can I again give you a quote?

Yes, please, which I love.

It's one of my favorite teachers.

And his name is A.H. Almas.

And he says, your conflicts, all the difficult things,

the problematic situations in your life

are not chance or have hazard.

They're actually yours.

They're specifically yours designed specifically for you

by a part of you that loves you more than anything else.

The part of you that loves you more than anything else

has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself.

You're not going to go in the right direction

unless there's something pricking on the side,

saying, telling you, look here, this way.

That part of you loves you so much

that it doesn't want you to lose the chance.

It will go to extreme measures to wake you up.

It will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen.

What else can it do?

That's its purpose.

And I found this to be true of physical illness

and mental problems and everything.

You've got to see, what is the teaching here?

So we can look at all these things as problems

to get rid of, which is what the personality wants to do.

Or we can look at them as learning opportunities,

which is what your two self wants to do.

Now, two things.

One is you talk about intention in life.

So my wife and I had a holiday recently in Costa Rica.

Partly it was a working holiday,

but partly it was just a holiday.

Traditionally, we've had terrible times

during holidays.

Partly because my work at Holidays

and once I go into a holiday, I just collapse

and now my wife is dragging a corksour on it.

You know?

Because I'm a workaholic.

You know, in a head and clear space.

So this time, we actually wanted to do a holiday

with intention.

This is nothing but it's like deluxe.

Just to do that, we said an intention.

What is an intention?

And if we have an intention, I've learned

from a couple of very wise teachers,

what structures we want to set up to support our intention.

And how are we going to handle

when there's kind of disagreement or conflict?

We had a beautiful holiday

because it was the first intonation of holiday

that we've had.

So that intention in life in general

is absolutely essential.

Like every morning, what is my actual intention?

So the problem is the upset.

So want to do a bit of an exercise?

Sure.

OK, if you don't like it, just tell me.

This is something I do in my groups

or when I speak or in the song when I teach.

I ask people to tell me some recent episode

when they're upset with somebody with their lives

and something that they open to sharing.

So it doesn't have to be anything stored either thing.

But just something, whether it's your spouse, partner,

or a bus driver, I don't care.

Sure.

A friend.

OK, so are you willing to go there?

Anything.

OK, I can share anything.

Just where you upset with somebody.

OK, yes.

OK, so what happened?

Describe it.

What happened?

All right, there were a number of issues

in my home broken aspects of the home,

things that were falling apart or needed to be fixed.

Physically.

Physically, yeah.

Right.

And I had hired someone to do these things

while I was gone.

OK.

And I came back and none of them were fixed.

OK.

And your emotional reaction was?

Anger.

Rage.

Anger.

OK.

Anything else besides anger?

I think they're close cousins.

Frustration.

Frustration is anger, yeah.

Yeah.

I was disappointed.

Just disappointed is sadness.

Yeah, it's a different feeling.

So it's disappointed.

Myself also, because I started to look at how maybe,

well, this appointed is not so much an emotion.

There's a state of mind.

I'm asking what the emotions were.

What's inside disappointment?

Something didn't happen.

I wanted to happen.

How do I feel?

Isn't there sadness there?

Sure.

Yeah, there's sadness.

I'm not talking into it.

I'm just asking.

Well, I suppose I might be confusing state of mind

and states of mind and emotions.

Yeah.

I'm not sure how to do it.

I'm looking at the role emotion.

Yeah, sadness.

So there's anger and sadness.

Those are the emotions.

Let's go with that.

OK.

So I'm going to ask you a silly question.

What were you said in anger about?

Well, I suppose the answer, which is not the right answer,

I'm expecting was I was angry that someone had made

commitments to me and not fulfilled those commitments.

And that's what happened.

They had made the commitment in the phone.

But that doesn't tell me what you were said or angry about.

What does that mean that they didn't fulfill their commitments?

Ment that they didn't care about me.

They didn't respect me.

So they didn't care about you and didn't respect you.

What kind of person doesn't get carried away respected?

I might need a lifeline here.

Don't know.

Someone who doesn't deserve to be cared for or respected.

Exactly.

It's going to be unworthy, right?

Sure.

Overrespect and care.

OK.

Now, if two other people here, which there usually are

when I do this exercise, I would ask them, OK,

we just listen to him tell us about this experience.

Other other reasons why this other person might not

have done the work that has nothing to do with him or her,

not caring about him or not respecting him.

So what other reasons might there be?

A million in one.

A million.

Yeah.

He could have, he could be in the hospital.

He could have been in hospital.

What a part of her.

Her cared one could have been in a car accident.

Exactly.

He had a flight delaying at Codan, Puerto Rico during a hurricane.

Yeah.

He's got ADHD.

Yeah.

And he can't follow through.

He's under stress.

And he couldn't do that.

OK, OK, OK, now.

The email that I was supposed to send to sitting in drafts,

and I thought I'd sent it, but in fact, he never received it.

I mean, OK, any number of possibilities?

Yeah.

No.

Of all the possibilities that you've just outlined,

including they don't care about your respect,

which is the worst one.

The one I immediately defaulted to.

Right.

Well, I mean, the worst.

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Yeah, internally the worst assumption is the one that I immediately made.

Exactly.

So let's notice something.

Hey, you, I should say we, because we're all like this, we don't respond to what happens.

We respond to a perception of what happens.

Right.

OK, that's what the Buddha said.

It's with our minds you create the world.

So that if you'd fund at the ADHD or he was stressed, or you know, you might have been

sad for him, but we're not of an angry and you will not have been sad.

So first of all, we don't respond to what happens.

We respond to our perception of what happens to our interpretation of what happens.

Number one, number two, of all the possible interpretations we choose the worst one.

The two, thirdly, what I just said isn't true, we didn't choose it.

It's not like you went through all these possibilities.

And you said, well, multiple choices, option D.

Oh, no, he doesn't care about me.

He doesn't respect me.

You didn't do that.

You brain jumped there automatically, right?

Well, the question is why?

Now, here's the learning.

You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you

know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know,

you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know,

you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you

know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know,