Dr Gabor Maté | Authenticity Can Heal Trauma (Part 2)

strange for you, I think at some point you say that all

trauma

is preverbal and that a

trauma

is something that you are very careful to say in the book, look, it doesn't mean that you were run over or you were kidnapped, which are things like not being fed when you were a young child and not getting a response, yeah, yeah, um, and then you take that idea that trauma is something that can happen to a very young child and you say that before our minds can create the world, I know we do. the world we then live in, he says, but before that happens, the world makes our mind yes, and it is those first experiences for you that could be classified as traumas that become embedded in the child and manifest. them later in life for something, how does that happen?, how do you get it?, does it get embedded?, yeah, well, first of all, what kind of things are they and then why do they get involved.

Drama basically means a wound, so trauma is when you are hurt and that lingers and has an impact on your life later on, so tomorrow it is important to distinguish that trauma is not what happens to you, tell us what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you, so I just got back from Budapest. I was there. for representing this book about Hungarian and uh, this is, I don't know who designs this, but once you know, one of the things I have to do every day is Slim, you don't want to talk to me if I haven't done it.

I swung, you know, and I already swam this morning, okay, so in Budapest I was staying in a hotel and around the corner there is a swimming club where I go swimming every morning across the street, directly across the street, as far from us as, say, the second row. here is the building where my mother and I lived when I was 11 months old and I almost died there and she handed me over to a stranger on the street on the same cobblestones that are still there and so I didn't see her for five or six weeks many people know the story the trauma was not that she gave me to a stranger the trauma is what i did it means that any child what can the child mean except that I am being abandoned and who is left?

I abandoned someone who is not lovable, someone who is not loved, so the trauma is my feeling of not being loved and not being lovable, not being considered important enough and that trauma does not manifest itself for decades afterwards, so it is not the What happened to me as such because When you look at it objectively, what happened to me was that my mother gave me to a stranger and the stranger took me, both are great acts of love. In reality, that is the universe that loves this child to take care of him, but that is not so.

What matters is how I make it mean then the wound is then what happens inside us that becomes embedded in a nervous system like me as an emotional memory not as a memory I don't remember being handed over to a stranger about my mother because the

part

s of the brains that they remember aren't even online at that age, but they don't come online until years later, but the emotional memory of being hurt and abandoned and unloved is embedded in the nervous system and then activated every time something even vaguely resembling more late, decades later, it actually appears, if you look at the expression that's triggered, it's a really interesting expression, but these days we're, you know, trigger warning, you know, you didn't trigger me right, this is what it can be. fired for the trigger to do what is necessary it is a very small thing for a trigger to have any impact there has to be ammunition there it has to be an explosive charge so when they shoot me it is not because someone has done something but because what happened that they placed the explosive charge, the emotional baggage that I carry, so if I carry the emotional baggage of someone who does not have the feeling of being loved and important, anything later that reminds me of that will trigger me. and drives my behavior, this is how the throne works, it is embedded in the nervous system of the brain in a form of subverbal emotional memory.

Nothing by the way, I'm sorry to say one more thing, it's also better than the body, many of you will. have you had the experience or if you are a body worker like a masseuse inside you go to the masseuses they touch you on a certain

part

of the body and suddenly you are overwhelmed with emotion we have had that experience so that is the body like glass says glasses under mantle the body keeps score so the term is also embedded in the muscles and in the connective tissues and the nerves you also in the book point out that this word trauma is difficult to hear Don't say it in any way that it doesn't be negative, but the point you make in the book is that the story you tell yourself or your body assimilates is meant to help you in that moment and that's why it understands it. retained that in its original form it's doing something positive, then it becomes a good point, tell us more about that please, absolutely, so let's take someone with a diagnosis of personality disorder, you know, borderline personal disorder, one of these diagnoses that explain nothing. they can describe something, but they don't just don't explain anything that you know, so one of the characteristics is that they don't trust people, they just have a hard time forming relationships, and they get hurt very easily in a Well, that's a perfectly normal defensive response. to a childhood where you were hurt a lot that you shouldn't trust.

I mean, why would you want to trust? How could you trust if you always had the feeling of being disappointed and even betrayed? what is called a pathological manifestation actually begins as a coping mechanism and is associated with your survival or, um, depression, you know this disease of depression well, really, what does it mean to depress something? their emotions, but why would someone suppress their emotions just because it was dangerous for them to express them or unacceptable for them to express them? In other words, you hear a lot of parenting experts telling people to suppress their children's emotions. emotions if the emotions are not acceptable to the fans then a child in order to survive will suppress their emotions it will make them depressed that is a survival technique associated with being accepted and then being part of the family, something the child cannot do without it. once you associate something with survival, you're going to keep doing it, especially because it's unconscious, it's not like you chose to do it, it's just that you know that's how your organisms survived by depressing your emotions, now you're going to keep doing that. in fact, you would be afraid not to do it later if you are diagnosed with this disease, but it starts as a coping mechanism and there are many other of these coffee mechanisms that are associated with survival and therefore we do not abandon them because if we, if something, if our survival depends on being a certain way, if that's what we learned, we're not going to give it up so easily, especially when you point out that children have very few options, yes, the ones that are hardwired into us as mammals. . fight, flight or freeze well if you're a baby you can't fight yeah and you fade to flee so it doesn't leave you with much except like you say just freeze and yeah and that's it. need for attachment, this is a word that gets thrown around a lot, tell us about attachment, so this is a conflict, uh, it's probably fundamental to my work, in all kinds of conditions and also in all kinds of situations, it's a very powerful dynamic in Adult relationships, for example, are when the child has an absolute need to belong to the parents and to be cared for by the parents, which drives him to be close to someone to be cared for or to care for the other. other.

It's called attachment and mammals are creatures of attachment, they can't survive without attachment without a caring relationship, obviously Lion can't survive so attachment is fine, but then we have this other need that is also determined by evolution, what I call

authenticity

and just out. all of our own

authenticity

being in touch with ourselves being in touch with our feelings and our bodies and our emotions um I know the last time I spoke here I think I asked the same question but let me ask it again um I think I did if you He I've had the experience of having a strong feeling about something and ignoring it and then regretting it, just raise your hand, okay, what you're telling me here is about your childhood, because instincts are essential for survival, we evolved as an artery in nature. millions of years the human audience the humanoid ancestors of our species lived in nature just as our own species lived in nature for most of our existence as a species of the 150,200,000 years that homo sapiens has walked the Earth if that can be represented in an hour and until about five minutes ago we lived in nature, how long does a creature survive in nature if it is not in touch with its instincts, so being in touch with our bodies and our emotions is essential also fantastic, but what happens is that if for the sake of fitting in with family or with culture that doesn't particularly support our authenticity we have to give up our connection to ourselves, our authenticity for the sake of attachment, then being inauthentic Being out of touch with ourselves is how we survive, we are afraid to be ourselves because we associate being ourselves with the threat of being rejected and this means that for the rest of our lives we will be in relationships that we have faith in. to be ourselves to really say what we feel now, that has tremendous implications.

When I say tremendous, I mean significant implications. One study that I cite in the book followed 2,000 women for 10 years over a 10-year period. These women are unhappily married. and they did not express their feelings, we are four times more likely to die than those women who are unhappily married, but they did talk about their things, so the lack of authenticity, which is not a moral, is not a moral judgment of My part, it's something that people do. to survive childhood, but that takes a significant toll in terms of physical and mental

heal

th, not to mention your relationships, where you're afraid to be yourself, where you're in a relationship and you're not even them.

Not even your partner doesn't even know you because you are afraid to be yourself and that's why you feel alone even when you are in a relationship because if they don't know you you will feel alone no matter how many people surround you so you know that the price we pay for authenticity is huge and yet so many of us survive our childhood and when you raise your hand, I mean have you ever met a day old baby who wasn't in touch with that visceral feeling oh I'm tired and I'm hungry and I'm uncomfortable and I'm wet but mom and dad are working really hard I better not cry I better not cry, you know, come on, you know, in other words when you raise your hand, something happened between the day in that you were born and a few years later, when you no longer listen to your instincts because you couldn't afford it, something happened, one of the things that is perceived very strongly, especially in the first years.

Part of the book is that we tend to think that children learn things when we teach them when they come to school or when we can have a conversation with them and very clearly in the book what is conveyed is that children become who they are and learn. . their first moral language, so to speak before all that, in other words, if you think, I will wait until the child can speak and then I will teach him, it's too late, they already learned everything from what you did or I didn't do it, yes, it's true, so, um and as a parent, because I was pretty out of touch with myself and from my own story, I never felt comfortable playing with kids.

I continued to think well once they learn the language because I. I'm good with words, you see, so I thought once they learn the language they won't be able to do it, but I didn't understand the point is that the real development happens even before the words appear, the emotional part of the brain, the holistic part. , more could be said. feminine although not determined by gender at all holistic emotional part of the brain the right side of the brain both in terms of the evolution of the species but also in terms of the development of the individual the right side of the brain the emotional brain develops first and is the model for everything, if we take the rights out of the right brain, the left brain will continue very well if we do not take out the right side of the brain, if we do not establish the emotional relationships that children need for

heal

thy development.

So they might develop intellectually on the left side of the brain, but they'll be very underdeveloped, there won't be a proper model for it, and then they'll be teachers and all that kind of stuff, you know, or philosophers, I don't know. I don't even know doctors for them, so in this culture the left brain really rules, but the left brain is divorced from a healthy emotional foundation, where does that get us? It takes us to where we are, which is that we are the only ones. species, but the only species that creates environments that are destructive to its own species, that's how we look, that's how the left brain has become because the right brain is underdeveloped andthey and they can't speak, you can't, in some ways, you don't have verbal access to the lessons of that first language that you learned before when you were six months old, so how does that part of us relate to us when we don't want to listen? ?

It speaks to us through our um see. this is what is the other thing that we think we have this brain up here and what is a brain a brain interprets the stimuli from the environment processes them and responds that is what a brain does so yeah , we have the brain up here but there is also it turns out that there is a brain connected to the heart, there is a nervous system that surrounds the heart that is in communication with this brain here and, of course, the intestine has been called the second brain, the The gut has more neurochemicals than the brain in some cases.

Shapes and visceral feelings are not luxuries, as we have shown, they are actually a form of knowledge, so the intestine processes stimuli from the environment. When these three brains are synchronized with each other, then you have true wisdom and then you have it through consciousness. when this one is decoupled from the other two, you can have all kinds of logic and all kinds of science and all kinds of technology, but you will not have wisdom.