Dr. Gabor Mate shares his personal journey of healing the trauma he experienced as an infant baby when his Jewish family was subject to Nazi occupation in Hungary. Trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is the wound that you sustained. This is a good thing! Because if trauma was what happened to you, how can you heal? But emotional wounds can be healed at any time if one is willing to recognize their wounds and begin to give them the loving attention they require to heal.
Suffering is not because of the pain we experience but because of our refusal to accept the pain. And I just really got that very clearly, very recently. So all my life I’ve been carrying around the pain and the resistance to the pain of what happened to me in infancy and what happened to my family, which is that being Jews in Hungary under the Nazi occupation, my family was devastated by the genocide. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. My mother and I spent my first year of my life under Nazi occupation under conditions of privation and terror. I was sick. I was hungry. I was separated from my mother as a one year old and all that left a deep imprint in my brain and in my mind and in my body.
So based on that childhood, infant travail, I’d always been convinced that some light had been killed inside me that will never open up – the light of unity, the light of love, the light of presence, you know. I could talk about it, I could teach about it, I could help others, but I will never get there myself. And I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, “you, Gabor have always had this loyalty to your grandparents who were killed in Auschwitz and all the suffering in the world. And you’ve always made yourself believe that for you to be happy or to experience joy is to betray all that suffering.” And I was talking to somebody else, and she said to me, “you can’t give the Nazis that victory that they killed the light in you. You can’t give that to them.”
And it really hurts, you know? All that stuff really hurts. But what creates the trauma is not that something hurts but that we don’t know how to be with that pain. So we build all these defenses against it – we close our hearts, we try and do too much to fix things, we take on too much responsibility, or we deny responsibility altogether. But we try to protect ourselves from the hurt of it. And so it’s almost like a scar that forms around the wound. The wound is very sensitive, and it’s very painful if anybody touches it. But the scar tissue is also very hard and it’s not very flexible. It’s very rigid. So it’s almost like trauma is a combination of a sensitive wound that if somebody touches it, it just triggers you and you’re hurt like crazy. Or if they touch scar tissue, there’s no feeling there, there’s hardness, there’s no flexibility.
So trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is the wound that you sustained. That’s a good thing, because if trauma was what happened to me when I was a year old, I’m 77, I’m 76 years too late, aren’t I? But if trauma is a wound that I sustained, wounds can be healed at any time. And so if you look at the essence of trauma, it is a disconnection from the self. And so when you didn’t experience affirmation and love, you were just disconnected from yourself. That’s all. So that self affirmation, that love that can be reconnected with because it was never lost. It was just covered up by this wound and scar. So airy fairy as it might sound, the work is really to reconnect with one’s true self, and to heal the wound, and that can be done for anybody who opens themselves to it.
It can’t be done for people who don’t realize they’re wounded. And the nature of this society is to give us so many distractions from ourselves. And so many people are so uncomfortable to spend even a moment with themselves. And I know that for myself, the urge to check the cell phone every minute, or if I have a free minute to Google something. This society is built on filling people’s emptiness from the outside which can never be done. And that’s why it’s also addictive because so many of us grew up with that emptiness. And then we need to fill it with our activities and our acquisitions and our relationships and our beliefs and our ideologies, rather than saying “okay, there’s emptiness here, what does that feel like? And what is that all about?” So healing does require the willingness to really experience oneself with the way one really is in the body and in the mind and in the heart.
I’m not interested in hope. I don’t know what’s going to happen. What I do know is that I’m here now and you’re here now. And the question is, What possibility is present at this very second for you, and I and everybody else who is listening, wherever they are, to bend the future in a humane and loving direction?
Gabor Maté is a Hungarian-Canadian physician. He has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma, and in their potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health, including on autoimmune disease, cancer, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addictions, and a wide range of other conditions. Maté’s approach to addiction focuses on the trauma his patients have suffered and looks to address this in their recovery. In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Maté discusses the types of trauma suffered by addicts and how this affects their decision making in later life. He believes in the connection between mind and body health. He has authored four books exploring topics including ADHD, stress, developmental psychology, and addiction.
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Dr. Gabor Mate shares his personal journey of healing the trauma he experienced as an infant baby when his Jewish family was subject to Nazi occupation in Hungary. Trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is the wound that you sustained. This is a good thing! Because if trauma was what happened to you, how can you heal? But emotional wounds can be healed at any time if one is willing to recognize their wounds and begin to give them the loving attention they require to heal.
Suffering is not because of the pain we experience but because of our refusal to accept the pain. And I just really got that very clearly, very recently. So all my life I’ve been carrying around the pain and the resistance to the pain of what happened to me in infancy and what happened to my family, which is that being Jews in Hungary under the Nazi occupation, my family was devastated by the genocide. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. My mother and I spent my first year of my life under Nazi occupation under conditions of privation and terror. I was sick. I was hungry. I was separated from my mother as a one year old and all that left a deep imprint in my brain and in my mind and in my body.
So based on that childhood, infant travail, I’d always been convinced that some light had been killed inside me that will never open up – the light of unity, the light of love, the light of presence, you know. I could talk about it, I could teach about it, I could help others, but I will never get there myself. And I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, “you, Gabor have always had this loyalty to your grandparents who were killed in Auschwitz and all the suffering in the world. And you’ve always made yourself believe that for you to be happy or to experience joy is to betray all that suffering.” And I was talking to somebody else, and she said to me, “you can’t give the Nazis that victory that they killed the light in you. You can’t give that to them.”
And it really hurts, you know? All that stuff really hurts. But what creates the trauma is not that something hurts but that we don’t know how to be with that pain. So we build all these defenses against it – we close our hearts, we try and do too much to fix things, we take on too much responsibility, or we deny responsibility altogether. But we try to protect ourselves from the hurt of it. And so it’s almost like a scar that forms around the wound. The wound is very sensitive, and it’s very painful if anybody touches it. But the scar tissue is also very hard and it’s not very flexible. It’s very rigid. So it’s almost like trauma is a combination of a sensitive wound that if somebody touches it, it just triggers you and you’re hurt like crazy. Or if they touch scar tissue, there’s no feeling there, there’s hardness, there’s no flexibility.
So trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is the wound that you sustained. That’s a good thing, because if trauma was what happened to me when I was a year old, I’m 77, I’m 76 years too late, aren’t I? But if trauma is a wound that I sustained, wounds can be healed at any time. And so if you look at the essence of trauma, it is a disconnection from the self. And so when you didn’t experience affirmation and love, you were just disconnected from yourself. That’s all. So that self affirmation, that love that can be reconnected with because it was never lost. It was just covered up by this wound and scar. So airy fairy as it might sound, the work is really to reconnect with one’s true self, and to heal the wound, and that can be done for anybody who opens themselves to it.
It can’t be done for people who don’t realize they’re wounded. And the nature of this society is to give us so many distractions from ourselves. And so many people are so uncomfortable to spend even a moment with themselves. And I know that for myself, the urge to check the cell phone every minute, or if I have a free minute to Google something. This society is built on filling people’s emptiness from the outside which can never be done. And that’s why it’s also addictive because so many of us grew up with that emptiness. And then we need to fill it with our activities and our acquisitions and our relationships and our beliefs and our ideologies, rather than saying “okay, there’s emptiness here, what does that feel like? And what is that all about?” So healing does require the willingness to really experience oneself with the way one really is in the body and in the mind and in the heart.
I’m not interested in hope. I don’t know what’s going to happen. What I do know is that I’m here now and you’re here now. And the question is, What possibility is present at this very second for you, and I and everybody else who is listening, wherever they are, to bend the future in a humane and loving direction?
Coming soon.
Music:
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