Name: Dr. Gabor Maté | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #538
Uploaded: 2024-10-15T15:00:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Gabor Maté | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #538' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Gabor Maté | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #538' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-15. Transcript available.

Dr. Gabor Maté | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #538

We have some upcoming tour dates there in Colorado Springs in Colorado, Casper,
Wyoming, Billings, Montana, and Missoula, Montana, Bloomington, Indiana,
Columbus, Ohio, Champaign, Illinois over there in the Fighting Illini area,
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Lafayette, Louisiana, and Beaumont, Texas.
You can get all your tickets at TheoVaughn.com slash T-O-U-R, and thank you so
much for the support.
Today's guest is a physician and an author.
His works explore such topics like stress, trauma, addiction, developmental
psychology, and more.
He has a new book called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a
Toxic Culture.
I'm grateful today to spend time with Dr. Gabor Mate.
Shine that light on me
I'll sit and tell you my stories
Shine on me
And I will find a song
I've been singing
Amongst us
I saw your interview with Donald Trump.
Oh, you did?
And I was actually quite struck.
I saw the segment on his brother's alcoholism.
Yeah.
I found him unusually without bombast and almost tender and very vulnerable and
just kind of humble, you know?
Yeah.
Which is not how usually he comes across.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was trying to just talk to him about something that felt pretty normal,
you know?
Yeah.
But he's also expressed interest in you and your brother.
Yeah, I thought it was sweet of him.
Yeah, yeah.
As sweet as he could be.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I think I...
Well, look, when you read further in the book, I actually talk about him.
Really?
His childhood trauma, yeah.
Oh, you do?
Him and Hillary Clinton's both.
Oh, wow.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Oh, that's cool.
I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just...
Yeah, it's like...
Especially like just as a regular person in the world, you kind of...
You want to try to get a feel for somebody.
I use a poster boy for trauma.
Yeah.
In my view.
Yeah, I wouldn't...
I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot...
If there's a lot of it there.
I mean, his brother had addiction and like...
And even him, I think, trying to learn about addiction.
I wish I could...
I wish I would have stayed in that conversation a little bit more with Donald
and tried to share some thoughts and things that I had.
Not thoughts, but a little bit more explanation about addiction from my own
perspective.
Yeah.
You know?
Wow, that would have been an interesting conversation.
Yeah, just to let him know that it wasn't something his brother...
Like, it wasn't like his brother just couldn't stop drinking.
No.
You know?
No.
That he had other things inside of him that prevented him from doing that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I really wish that if I could go back...
But one of the things that's been tough for me is just you get into certain
conversations
and I'm still learning how to be in conversations sometimes.
So sometimes it's...
You know, you're learning on the stove.
We're always learning.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're always learning.
Gabor, that's how you say it?
Gabor.
Gabor.
Yeah.
Nice to meet you today, Mr. Mate, and thanks for coming.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Yep.
And thanks for sharing this book, man.
This is your book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic
Culture.
Yeah.
You believe that we are kind of a sick culture.
What makes you believe that?
Well...
Or like what proof do you have of that?
Well, so 70% of American adults are at least on one medication.
70%.
40% are on two medications or more.
The number of children being diagnosed with all manner of dysfunctions,
disorders, mental
health challenges like ADHD, self-cutting, addictions, anxiety, depression,
childhood suicide
keeps going up.
In the United States, annually, twice as many people die of overdoses as died
in Iraq, Vietnam,
and Afghan wars put together.
This is every year.
Wow.
The life expectancy, particularly of white men, has gone down due to suicide
and drug overdoses.
I mean, I could go...
The number of autoimmune...
I could go on on it forever, but just statistically, there's more and more
evidence of illness and
dysfunction.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the overdose in alone is unbelievable.
You know, the fact that that's, that that's even just become a common thing in
our society
is, it's heartbreaking for so many.
It's heartbreaking for so many and so many people's families, just the residual
effect
of suicide or overdose.
It's like, we don't even think about, those numbers don't even take into the
ripple effect
of people losing a loved one.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, the families that are being devastated.
And I mean, I used to work with what is North America's most concentrated area
of drug use
in Vancouver, British Columbia.
And I know you were there a month ago.
Yeah, we went down on Catchings.
Is that right?
The Hastings.
Hastings, yeah.
We went down on Hastings just to take a drive and see.
Well, so that's where I used to work.
Wow.
And for 12 years as a physician and everybody down there was severely traumatized
in childhood
and their addictions were all a response to immense emotional pain that they
didn't know
how else to handle, not to mention the racial aspect, like 30% of my clients
were indigenous,
whereas they only make up 5% of the Canadian population.
So the more you suffer either socially or individually, the more likely you are
to escape in the soothing
and the relief that drugs or other addictions offer.
So if you look at American society, you really got to be asking, why are so
many people having
to escape from reality?
Yeah.
And we're going to get into good stuff.
I have a good plan today.
I'm prepared.
Some stuff, I have some questions that I even wrote down that are on cards just
because I
want to make sure that we get the best information that we can for our guests
today.
I think it's really important.
One of the things that you talk about in the book that's causing a lot of
sickness is trauma.
Yeah.
And then more specifically, unprocessed trauma.
Yeah.
Help me define those a little bit for our audience.
Sure.
So trauma is one of these words that everybody throws around.
Yeah.
It's a buzzword.
Yeah.
So let's just define it.
So trauma literally comes from the Greek word for wound or wounding.
So trauma is a wound, whether it's a physical wound or a psychological wound.
In this case, we're talking about emotional wounds that haven't healed.
So trauma is an unhealed wound that you sustain in childhood, but then it stays
with you.
And it directly causes inflammation in the body.
It affects all your genes function or your chromosomes function.
It stresses your organs.
It creates all kinds of physiological problems.
On an emotional level, it instills a lot of pain in you that you try to escape
from.
And one of the ways you try to escape, for example, is through drug use or to
other kinds of addictions or to self-cutting or bulimia or pornography or
whatever.
It also makes you suppress, disconnects you from your own emotions because when
a child is being traumatized, it's too painful to connect to themselves.
So they disconnect.
And that disconnect then causes all kinds of problems in terms of illness,
mental and physical.
So the impacts of trauma are vast and quite under-recognized.
Indeed.
And you talk about trauma also as not being seen and known.
Yeah.
So here we have to understand what are the needs of the human child.
So everybody understands that the child needs to be physically cared for,
cleaned up, fed, and sheltered, and so on.
Children, according to evolution, also have emotional needs that they're born
with.
One of them is being just accepted and valued for exactly who they are and
being seen rather than being forced to be something that the parents want them
to be.
Yeah.
And a lot of parents in this society, not because they don't love their kids,
but because they're so stressed, have just a hard time seeing their kids.
I had trouble seeing my kids.
Wow.
And that had an impact on them.
And not because I wasn't devoted, because I didn't love them, just because of
my own trauma, I couldn't even see myself.
Oh, man, I can relate so much to it.
I can relate so much to that.
Yeah.
It's like, it's funny because I work as a comedian and for like, I grew up in a
kind of a traumatic home.
Like my, my mom was very busy.
We had, she had four children and yeah, I feel like she never looked at me.
I feel like she never kind of put her hands on me.
I feel like she just, and she didn't know how, I guess, you know, it's okay.
Yeah, I just always felt like I wasn't seen.
And how do you, and how do you suppose that affected you?
Well, I ended up being, becoming a comedian.
I felt like I started, I had to find some way to be seen.
I had to do something, you know, to get someone to see me because I needed to
survive.
You know, I needed to feel alive, you know?
You know, it's funny about comedians.
May I say something about them?
Yeah.
I looked at the back of, you saw a number of comedians.
What you're talking about is like a common theme.
I looked at Robin Williams, who's this brilliant, brilliant comic.
And one of the reasons he developed his humor was to make his mother laugh as a
way of having
his mother pay attention to him.
Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer, the same thing.
Wow.
So that they had the innate talent, but then they used that talent to be seen
and valued,
where they should have been valued with or without talent.
No matter what.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's funny.
A few years ago, I thought it's like, I'm kind of a late bloomer.
Like, I only realized that, like, I go to recovery meetings and stuff like that.
I'm in AA.
Yeah.
And I only realized a few years ago, it started to hit me like, did I even want
to be a comedian?
Or did I just, at some early point, develop having to get attention because I
need, you
know, and then, so if that's the case, then who did I really want to, what, you
know, who
would, what would I have been if I didn't do that?
And not saying that, not saying that I'm not grateful and I don't love being a
comedian.
It's been, it's been a blessing, but, but it's like, if I created that, okay, I
have
to be this thing to, for you to see me, then who created that, you know, like
who, like,
was there a different me that was supposed to be there, but then I created this
new me?
Well, that's the dilemma for so many of us is that as a result of childhood
wounding,
we have to make ourselves into something that the world will accept and value.
Like, look, in my case, I love having been a physician and that's my calling,
but the
big part of it wasn't just that I wanted to help humanity or heal people, it's
also needed
to be important.
Now, why do they need to be important?
Because as an infant, I got the message that I wasn't.
Yeah.
And, and so now then, and that creates a kind of an addiction because you have
to keep
proving to yourself how important you are and how valuable you are, but nobody
should
have to prove how valuable they are.
That's just our birthright, that we exist.
We have the right to be here.
Yeah.
That God chose us or that the energies of the world chose us and said, I'm
going to put
you here like a, with a fine pen, I'm going to put you in the world.
Yeah.
And I did it on purpose and, and the world, it was built to take care of you
and to nurture
you and to make you feel welcome as you are.
And if, and if you actually look at, and this has been studied quite
extensively, how it
didn't indigenous people or tribal peoples close to the land rear their kids.
That's exactly how they wear their kids.
Like they gave their children a deep sense of acceptance.
They hold them.
They carry them everywhere.
Oh yeah.
All the paintings you see of a native Americans, they always, somebody's got a
kid on them.
They got them in a knapsack.
They got them right.
They got them and they tend not to hit their kids.
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
You never seen a movie about a native American beating his children.
I don't think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, so what you're describing is actually how we evolved and part of
the toxicity in
my view of our culture is we've gone so far aw