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Dr Gabor Maté - Childhood Trauma Creates Addiction

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January 5, 2019

This video discusses viewpoints that may not align with the consensus of the medical or scientific community. Consult with a qualified healthcare provider before attempting any new health or wellness routines.

Close Encounters With Addiction

“Not everybody who was traumatised becomes addicted, but everyone addicted was traumatised.”

In short: Dr Gabor Maté is the Hungarian-born Canadian physician and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and in this 2019 London Real conversation he told Brian Rose how childhood trauma creates addiction, from workaholism and parenting to heroin, iboga and drug policy. His central answer: not everyone who is traumatised becomes addicted, but everyone who is addicted was traumatised, because every addiction is a response to an unhealed wound.

Recorded in London shortly after Gabor received the Order of Canada for his work on trauma, addiction and mind-body health, this was his second sit-down with Brian, following their 2017 episode Why You Are Addicted. He returned in 2022 to talk about The Myth of Normal, the book he first described in this interview.

The conversation was unusually personal. Gabor spoke openly about his own addiction to work and the ultimatum his wife gave him, then turned the questions on Brian: his restlessness as a father, his past heroin addiction, the London Real film Iron Mind and whether Ironman racing had become a new addiction.

Key takeaways

Trauma is what happens inside you. Gabor defined trauma not as the painful event itself but as being alone with your pain and sadness, with no one to help you process it. Children cannot be protected from loss, but they can go through it accompanied by a nurturing adult.
Everyone addicted was traumatised. Across tens of thousands of conversations, Gabor said, he had never met an addicted person without childhood trauma, though the trauma need not be dramatic: it can simply be needs that were never met.
Ask what the addiction gives you. His two questions for any addiction are what benefit it brings, such as feeling important or wanted, and what it costs you. When the cost outweighs the benefit, the motivation to change appears.
The power to parent comes from the relationship. Drawing on Hold On to Your Kids, Gabor argued that children who lack adult attachment turn to their peers, and that timeouts and cry-it-out methods teach children that love is conditional. He recommended a time-in instead.
Keep young children away from screens. In his view screens are addictive and can displace real attachment, so digital media should come later, under the parents’ control, once children no longer need it to meet emotional needs.
The obsession is optional. When Brian asked whether his workaholism was the price of his mission, Gabor separated the two: genuine commitment to helping people would remain, and could become more effective, without the obsession.
Opiates offer pain relief, pleasure and love. Gabor explained that heroin acts on the brain’s endorphin system, which is why a person deprived of those three qualities can feel normal for the first time on it.

Gabor Maté on workaholism, powerlessness and his own addiction

Brian opened by asking about the pin on Gabor’s lapel: the Order of Canada, which Gabor said mattered to him as recognition that a more humane, trauma-informed approach was reaching the mainstream. He then explained that his previous trip to London in 2016 had been the most miserable time of his life. Depleted by speaking work, he was told by his wife that he was a workaholic and that she would no longer put up with it.

Gabor described this as the first step of recovery: admitting powerlessness. Despite all his teaching, he said, he had not taught himself. He spoke about the many selves inside each of us, his true self as a kind of higher power, and the daily yoga practice that left him more grounded and less driven. Every speaking invitation, he added, now had to be approved by his wife.

He named work as his main addiction, ahead of the shopping addiction he had written about, because he liked who he was at work and the world rewarded it. The question underneath, he suggested, was the trauma-born belief that he was not enough.

Parenting, attachment and screens

Brian admitted he had cut short a family holiday because he could not relax with his children. Gabor told him that restless, unhappy parents send children the message that something is wrong with them, and that the first three years of life are the core of development. Real relationship, he said, depends not on words but on the parent’s presence.

Discussing his co-written book Hold On to Your Kids, Gabor explained peer orientation: when children lack attachment to nurturing adults they fill the void with their peers, and parents lose the power to parent. He read from his mother’s diary from 1944, in Nazi-occupied wartime Hungary, describing how doctors’ orders kept her from picking him up when he cried. Instead of timeouts he recommended validating a child’s feelings while still holding limits, and he said stepparents must build a relationship before they can expect to parent.

On social media and devices, Gabor said he would keep young children away from screens altogether, introduce them later under parental control, and treat Facebook friendships and likes as a poor substitute for being known and accepted.

Iron Mind, John Joseph and the meaning of trauma

Brian talked about Iron Mind, the London Real film in which Gabor appears, about his Ironman challenge with Cro-Mags singer John Joseph and his own past heroin addiction. Gabor told Brian that comparing traumas is meaningless and unkind to yourself: each person’s pain is real. Asked whether children can be raised without trauma, he said yes, if they are not left alone with their difficult emotions, though it is hard in a highly traumatised society.

Gabor then asked Brian whether Ironman had become a new addiction, and challenged his use of the word trying. On John Joseph’s refusal to forgive his abusers, Gabor said the primary trauma was that John had no one to tell, and that forgiveness is never a goal: healing is, and forgiveness either follows or it does not. He suggested therapies that bypass talking, such as EMDR, somatic experiencing or psychedelic work.

Plant medicines, opiates and drug policy

Gabor explained why former addicts often reject ayahuasca: they miss the difference in set and setting between numbing yourself with heroin and a ceremonial setting designed to help you see more. In his experience, iboga could stop heroin withdrawal, but it was no cure, because the underlying trauma still had to be addressed. After a ceremony, his advice was to stop talking about it, integrate the insights and let others notice the change.

He said medical schools barely mention trauma and should teach it for a full year, and previewed his next book, The Myth of Normal. On opiates, he described heroin as giving people pain relief, pleasure and love, the three qualities without which life feels unlivable. He argued that punishment re-traumatises the most hurt people, and that decriminalisation, safe supply and trauma-informed care would save lives at no extra cost.

The conversation closed on society and the planet, where Gabor remained optimistic in the long term, and on how, in his seventies, he wanted to live the rest of his life without trauma-driven decisions.

Who is Gabor Maté?

Dr Gabor Maté is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician and author, born in Budapest in 1944, whose family moved to Canada in 1956. He trained in medicine at the University of British Columbia, ran a family practice in East Vancouver for more than 20 years, coordinated the palliative care unit at Vancouver Hospital, and spent twelve years as staff physician for the Portland Hotel Society in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the work behind In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

His other books include Scattered Minds, When the Body Says No, Hold On to Your Kids with Gordon Neufeld, and The Myth of Normal with Daniel Maté. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2018. More about his work and talks is at drgabormate.com.

Frequently asked questions

When did Gabor Maté appear on London Real?

Gabor Maté first appeared on London Real in 2017. This episode, Childhood Trauma Creates Addiction, was published in January 2019, and he returned in 2022 to discuss The Myth of Normal.

What does Gabor Maté say causes addiction?

Gabor told Brian that addiction is a response to an unhealed wound from childhood. In his words, not everybody who was traumatised becomes addicted, but everyone addicted was traumatised, and the trauma does not have to be dramatic.

How does Gabor Maté define trauma?

He said trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you. The core of it is being alone with painful emotions, without a nurturing adult to help you process them.

Can you raise children without trauma, according to Gabor Maté?

He said yes, though it is hard in a stressed society. Children cannot be protected from loss and disappointment, but they can go through it with a present, supportive adult, which is what prevents it becoming trauma.

What does Gabor Maté say about kids and screens?

He said he would keep young children away from devices, because screens are addictive and can replace real attachment. Digital media should come later and stay under the parents’ control.

Why does Gabor Maté say heroin is so addictive?

He explained that opiates act on the endorphin system, which provides pain relief, pleasure and the feeling of love. People deprived of those qualities can feel normal for the first time when they use heroin.

What did Gabor Maté say about workaholism?

He described work as his own main addiction, rewarded by the world but costly at home. He said recovery starts with admitting powerlessness and honestly weighing what the addiction gives you against what it costs.

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Full transcript: Gabor Maté on London Real

5:23 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Gabor Maté, the renowned speaker, physician and author. You’ve written many best-selling books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which is based on your findings from 12 years practicing medicine in Vancouver’s most concentrated area of drug users. You’re also known for your expertise on child trauma, stress and the mind-body connection. Your work reframes how we view all human development. Gabor, welcome back to London Real.

6:00 Gabor Maté: What a pleasure to be back. Thank you.

6:02 Brian Rose: Huge pleasure to have you here. We have so much to talk about today, but first, let’s talk about that pin on your lapel there. What does that signify?

6:10 Gabor Maté: Thanks for giving me bragging rights. This pin represents the Order of Canada, which is Canada’s highest civilian distinction. It’s kind of the Canadian equivalent of the MBE, and I got it this year for my work on trauma and addiction and mind-body health. So I was so pleased to get it, not because of the personal distinction, which is nice, but because of the recognition of the work. It just means that an understanding of trauma and a more humane approach to human beings is actually now being recognized by the mainstream in a deeper way. So I was very pleased to get it.

6:45 Brian Rose: Yeah. And did that surprise you? Because it always seemed like the mainstream was slow to accept some of your ideas.

6:50 Gabor Maté: It was a very pleasant surprise. Only what I should have got years ago, but…

6:56 Brian Rose: Right. Was that in the works, or did it just surprise you?

7:00 Gabor Maté: I didn’t know anything about it. I just got this email all of a sudden from the Governor General’s office.

7:03 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s exciting. Twenty years earlier would have been better, but that’s not a bad start.

7:08 Gabor Maté: You know what, everything in its own time. Twenty years ago would not have been better, because it would have gone to my head, which is already big enough as it is. So it came at the right time.

7:14 Brian Rose: Well, we’ve got a lot to talk about today. I want to talk about parenting, we’ll talk about plant medicines, I want to talk about trauma and the mind-body connection. I also want to talk about how I hijacked you and put you in our latest movie, Iron Mind. I know you’ve watched it. I want to talk about that, and John Joseph. Before we get to all that, how have you been, and where have you been the last year and a half? I think last time you were here I thought you were slowing down a little bit, but it doesn’t look like you have.

7:43 Gabor Maté: So you want to know the sordid tale behind my life? The last time I was here in London was in June of 2016, and I was here on a speaking trip. I gave two day-long lectures, very well received, a lot of gratitude, standing ovations, all that. And I was here with my wife, and we were going to have a holiday around this speaking visit. We love London. It was the most miserable time of our lives, because I was totally depleted from all the work I’d done here and elsewhere, and literally we had a terrible time.

8:17 We’ve been married, this year it’ll be 49 years, and my wife said to me, literally, addressing my workaholism, she said, “Look, you’d better realize you’re a workaholic. You’ve written a book called When the Body Says No. You’d better write one called When the Wife Says No, because I’m not putting up with it anymore.” And that was right here in London. And she actually watched the interview you did with me, and she said to me, “You look so calm and collected and articulate. Who the hell is that person in your real life?”

8:59 And so that challenged me, and so we had to make a decision of what kind of life I really want. Now, the work is very satisfying, and there’s a lot of appreciation for it out there in the world. But at the same time, if I identify with it, if I make it my identity and who I am, I deplete myself and I suffer, and I impose suffering in my primary relationship as well. So I’ve really had to look at my life.

9:29 So I have slowed down. It may not look like it these last couple of months, but literally now every invitation I get has to be vetted and approved by my wife, which is not a matter of yielding control to her. It’s a matter of recognizing that I need support in making these decisions. And as a result of that, I’m enjoying life a lot more. I’ve just signed a contract to write two new books, which means I’ll have to stay home a lot more and actually do the writing.

9:57 So it was right here in London I had the crisis. You know, the Chinese word for crisis is made up of two ideograms: the one is for danger, the other for opportunity. So in every crisis there’s a danger and there’s an opportunity. And at the beginning of your movie Iron Mind, John Joseph says that we have to suffer to seek the truth, some words to that effect. And whether he knows it or not, he’s quoting the great Greek playwright Aeschylus, who in his Agamemnon, the chorus says, “By suffering, to truth.” So literally, it was that suffering imposed by my workaholism that led me to have to make decisions and to understand the truth, and therefore I feel a lot happier than I did when I was here last time.

10:51 Brian Rose: Glad I could facilitate that.

10:52 Gabor Maté: Of course. Thank you very much.

10:54 Brian Rose: How could you turn it on for our interview, which many, many hundreds of thousands of people have watched, and it meant a lot to people? How can you be that Gabor Maté in the orange jumper that’s just dropping knowledge, and then go home and be completely lost? Is that dynamic a surprise to you, or is it not?

11:10 Gabor Maté: It shouldn’t be. I know it myself.

11:12 Brian Rose: No idea? Yeah.

11:19 Gabor Maté: Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, says that some people can embody what he calls being, where they’re really, truly present and channel truth in their professional work, but they haven’t integrated it into their personal lives. And I’ve been one of those cases, where literally my wife sometimes says, “I’m married to a split personality.”

11:43 And I’ve also realized, by the way, through some work that I’ve done recently, that all of us have multiple personalities. The so-called multiple personality disorder is just at the extreme end of the scale, but multiple personality is human nature. Inside you and inside myself there are multiple ones. It’s like an internal family, and it’s a question of which aspect dominates. So one aspect dominates when I’m sitting here talking with you and feeling very comfortable and competent. It’s quite another when, depleted, I go home, and now I expect my wife to give me the energy and the happiness that I’ve deprived myself of.

12:23 Brian Rose: And so what does that look like? You just go quiet and silent, going deep, or depressed? What does that look like?

12:30 Gabor Maté: Depressed, alienated, irritable, reactive, blaming. You know, I’ve been able to get that way. And fortunately I’m married to somebody who will not absorb and put up with that.

12:44 Brian Rose: Right. She’ll call you on it. It’s not a codependent relationship.

12:49 Gabor Maté: She recognized the codependency, and she said, “That’s it. No more.”

12:53 Brian Rose: And what is the expression? Physician, heal thyself. So how does an addict fix their own addiction? It’s usually an impossible thing.

13:09 Gabor Maté: Well, I do think that, although I’m not out of the woods myself, I do think that the first step is where you admit your powerlessness, where you admit that this is bigger than me, that it’s bigger than the stratagems and the knowledge and best efforts of the little ego. You’ve got to get that this is bigger than me.

13:29 Brian Rose: You just really admit that you’re powerless.

13:31 Gabor Maté: I had to sit here in London, in the apartment that we were staying at, and admit that I’m powerless over my workaholism. Despite all the teaching that I do, and all the people that expressed their appreciation for what they learned from me, I haven’t taught myself. And that represents a kind of powerlessness, and you’ve got to start admitting that. But that is the first step.

13:55 Brian Rose: Right. And the next step is giving up control to someone else, or to her, to try to make steps to make a change? Because admitting it is not enough.

14:03 Gabor Maté: Well, that’s the first. The second step is where they talk about the higher power, and actually recognizing that there’s a higher power. Now, people can call that God. I’m not a religious person, and I’m not comfortable with the God terminology, which to me has a lot of negative and oppressive connotations or delusional connotations. For some people that word works, more power to them. But I know there’s more to me than just my addicted self. So in this internal multiplicity of Gabors, there is a true self that is capable of being present and aware and fair-minded and committed to truth. And that’s what you ask for help from, and you get the support for that.

14:51 Now, in my case, I had great support from my spouse, but also, of course, spiritual teachers. And I found, not surprisingly… I’m not a guru person, but I did meet a Hindu guru who has a yoga program, and I’m not a follower, but I learned the yoga and I’m doing that regularly now. Which again, I’m looking for something higher, because yoga means unity.

15:15 Brian Rose: So how was the yoga? Have you done it before?

15:18 Gabor Maté: I’ve always said I’m not a yoga person. I militantly refused to do yoga.

15:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, absolutely.

15:27 Gabor Maté: And then I learned Sadhguru’s program, and I’m not here to advocate for it, but it’s called Inner Engineering, and it’s about 45 minutes a day. I don’t have to go to a class. I do it myself at home, I do it in my hotel room, and when I do it I’m more balanced, I’m more grounded, I’m less driven, I’m less reactive. And if I don’t do it for a while, I notice a negative change. So again, there’s something higher than just my little mind.

15:56 Brian Rose: Okay. So I went on holiday this year, and of course, in typical Gabor Maté fashion, he’s getting me to talk about myself right away, so thank you. But in August I had two weeks off, and one week I spent with some family in kind of a weird camp place in Germany, and the next week was in Bordeaux, which I think they should rename to Boring, really. Because I got there with my two boys and my stepdaughter and everybody, and I’ll be honest, four days later I left and flew back to London alone, because I couldn’t be the holiday dad.

16:25 I just didn’t know what to do with myself. And I was even watching myself do it, and I was like, “Okay, let’s change, different frame of mind. What’s the problem? You need to be comfortable in the now.” I mean, I was trying to heal myself and I couldn’t do it, and I tapped out, as they would say in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and I came home. So I definitely struggle with this problem.

16:47 Gabor Maté: And what was on your mind when you were in Bordeaux?

16:50 Brian Rose: I just felt like I couldn’t do anything. And I said to myself, as Gabor would say, you don’t have to be doing something, you can just be. But while I knew that logically was true, I still felt this kind of, I don’t know, restlessness. And I was like, okay, focus on the kids, or this or that, or use this time to do something else, or learn, or explore. But I just couldn’t get rid of this uneasy feeling of things I needed to do. And so at some point I finally had to admit that I still felt this way, and I was not getting a solution, and it was getting worse. So I ejected.

17:25 Gabor Maté: Well, okay. If you could recognize in that experience that there’s something still missing for you in terms of your self-awareness, then that could be a teaching experience. And I know that holiday boredom that you describe. When I go on holiday, it actually takes me a while to relax into it. Now, the problem is when you’re with four other people and you also have to be there for them, and you can’t even be there for yourself, then you’re in a real dilemma. You’re either pretending to be a holiday dad or you’re being miserable.

18:14 I understand the dilemma, but I’m not sure that you want to stay with it that way for the rest of your life, because you’ve got these two young kids. And what’s the message to them? Dad is restless or unhappy, it’s their fault. They’re not adequate. Which happens to be your particular life story, I remember from our last conversation and also from your movie. So you’re passing this throughout the generations, so that you’re already passing it on.

18:38 Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist teacher, said that the greatest gift a parent can give to their child is his or her own happiness. And when you’re restless and unhappy around your kids, as I have been, they get a message that it’s about them. So that’s something good to recognize, as long as you take it on as a challenge.

19:05 Brian Rose: And you know, I know you have a whole book on this, and I’m going to be ordering it on Audible tonight. But things to think about when it comes to my relationship with my children: is that first lesson, happiness is the greatest gift I can give them?

19:18 Gabor Maté: Yeah.

19:25 Brian Rose: The first seven years are very important?

19:26 Gabor Maté: They’re actually… the first seven years are crucial. I would say the first three years are the nub of it. I also say to people, you get the first three years right, you can relax. If you don’t get the first three years right, you’ll be practicing remedial parenting for decades. And that’s just the first three years.

19:46 Brian Rose: So I’ve got six months left with my first son.

19:47 Gabor Maté: Well, I’m sure you didn’t screw it all up.

19:49 Brian Rose: And what does screwing it up look like? How would you know?

20:02 Gabor Maté: Well, first of all, you’d know because there I’m with my son and I’m not finding rest in it. So I don’t know how to be there with him, I don’t know how to be there for him. And I was like that, you know. I was always waiting for my kids to grow older, when I could intellectually engage them and now we’ll have something in common. But the sheer act of being, or the sheer state of being, I could never achieve with them. And it’s interesting, I look at my brothers, they’re so wonderful with little kids. They’re so spontaneously there for them. I never knew how to do that.

20:42 Brian Rose: So while you’re busy waiting for them to get old enough to talk and engage, you’ve already missed the window?

20:47 Gabor Maté: You missed it, because you haven’t developed… Because the real relationship doesn’t depend on words. It depends on the capacity to be with, the energy from you: I’m just here with you, I’m here and now, and I welcome your presence, and I welcome you to exist in my presence, and I’m overjoyed to have you in my presence. That’s what the child needs from a parent. And that’s communicated with body language and everything.

21:17 Brian Rose: Everything, and through the energy that you emanate. They can feel it?

21:19 Gabor Maté: They can absolutely feel it. They can’t name it, but they can feel it. And that already starts changing their personality right there, structuring their personality.

21:30 Brian Rose: Okay. And so that’s in the first few years. And so I was waiting to intellectually engage, which makes sense. They always say that mothers form a different bond than fathers. Is that just another way of…

21:42 Gabor Maté: That’s an anachronism. Mothers form a different bond, but only because mothers are present with their kids, whereas the fathers tend to visit the kids. I mean, you know, the father goes to work typically and visits at home for a couple of hours and then takes off again the next morning. Those fathers who stay home with their kids, they learn how to mother their kids. So it’s not a gender issue, it’s a relational issue. And the mothers allow themselves to be trained by the kids, whereas the fathers tend to impose their own impatience on the kid. Now, this is not universal, I’m talking by and large. So those fathers who have the good fortune, like in many civilized countries where parents are given paternity leave, those fathers learn to relate to their kids in a different way than the average father somewhere else. We can be trained, but we have to be present for the training.

22:36 Brian Rose: Right. Okay, yeah. I do think of this sometimes. I was in situations where he’s one or two years old and I’m thinking, “I don’t know what to do here. I don’t want to be here in the sun.” And I was just like, just breathe and just be here for him, you know, even if he’s playing, just be here.

22:51 Gabor Maté: When you say “even if he’s playing,” what do you mean?

22:56 Brian Rose: What if he’s doing something where it seems like I’m not involved?

22:58 Gabor Maté: But you are involved. It’s your presence that gives him the security that he can play on his own. The anxious child cannot play on his own, or he’ll play on his own as a way of protecting himself. When you actually look at animals play, the young, the cubs, play all the time, and play is the preparation for life. But it happens in the protective presence of the parents.

23:27 Brian Rose: Right. So we’re there to give them that time to develop in that way, with other kids and everything.

23:28 Gabor Maté: You’re there to give them that space.

23:33 Brian Rose: Okay. So some basic lessons: give them the gift of happiness, be present, even if you can’t verbally communicate. That’s not even the most important part. Just be there.

23:43 Gabor Maté: Not even if you can’t verbally communicate, because the two-month-old, the three-month-old or the six-month-old doesn’t understand words anyway. So the communication happens on a much deeper level.

23:52 Brian Rose: Okay. And the name of this book, if people want to get it?

23:57 Gabor Maté: Well, the name of the parenting book that I co-wrote is called Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. And that’s been published in over 20 languages internationally, and is being published in England in January. And what it’s about is that in our culture, children ever need to attach. They need to connect with somebody, because without that connection they don’t survive. And in the hunter-gatherer bands where human beings evolved, those attachments were not just with one adult or two adults, but with a whole set of nurturing adults.

24:28 In our culture, we’ve deprived the kids of the parental presence for the most part, and the child’s brain can’t handle an attachment void, where there’s no attachment figure. And in the absence of the parent or the nurturing adult, the child will fill that void with the peer group. Now kids become far more peer-attached than is healthy for them, and now peers become their models and their mentors, and they’re the templates for how to be, how to walk and how to talk. And as that happens, the kids push away from the parents, because they’re a lot more minded to belong to the peer group, which has different values from the parents. And the kid’s brain can’t handle that competition, so the brain of the child will actually choose the peer group over the parent.

25:18 And where that goes, you can see on Facebook, and you can see it in the teenage gangs, and you can see it in the increasing frustration of parents who’ve lost the power to parent. Because parents think that their power to parent comes from the fact that they have the responsibility and the strength and the wisdom. It doesn’t come from that. The power to parent comes from the desire of the child to belong to you. When the child is driven to belong to the peer group, because we’ve taken him out of his natural context, we lose the power to parent.

25:47 What do we do then? We ratchet up the pressure. We become more authoritarian. We lose the authority, so we become authoritarian. And the more authoritarian we become, the more pressure we put on, the more they resist. And now we label them with oppositional defiant disorder, and we call them obstreperous and bad and naughty kids. All they’re doing is acting out their attachment dynamics. So if you want to discipline kids, we actually have to make them our disciples. And a disciple is not somebody who’s afraid of you. A disciple is somebody who loves you and wants to belong to you and follow you. So discipline is the very opposite of punishment.

26:31 Brian Rose: And how do you do that with your kids?

26:34 Gabor Maté: Well, first of all, you realize that the most important template, in fact the essential template for the emotional development of the child, as well as for the brain’s healthy physiological development, is a nurturing relationship with emotionally responsive adults. That is the template for physiological brain development and healthy psychological development. That means that anything that you do that undermines the relationship with the child will actually undermine the child’s development, because it makes the child insecure. And kids in a state of insecurity are in defensive fight-or-flight mode, in which mode they don’t learn anything. They just start defending.

27:21 And so every time we use the relationship against the child… So I have a two-year-old who’s angry, and most psychologists and parenting experts will tell you: timeout. In other words, what they’re telling you is withdraw the relationship from the child as a way of threatening the child, and that threat will make the child comply with you. Well, the child may temporarily comply with you, but whatever else you taught her, you’ve taught her that the relationship is conditional, that they’re only acceptable to you if they please you. Furthermore, you’ve taught them that relationships are unstable and unreliable, and they’ve learned that you’re not available for them when they’re most upset.

28:04 Because why is he acting out? Why is he in a tantrum? Because they’re frustrated about something, because they’re angry about something, because they aren’t happy. And you say to them, “When you’re most unhappy, that’s when I’m least available to you.” And this is how parents are taught to parent. Furthermore, parents are taught not to pick up the kids when they’re crying, let them cry it out. Just utterly noxious. Because what lesson do they get? Their emotions don’t matter. That’s the lesson they get. Just the opposite of what any loving parent wants to teach.

28:38 So the parenting psychology in this culture has been anti-child, and as long as 70 years ago this was already the case. Dr. Spock, who you might recall, talked about the tyranny of the infant who wants to be picked up. And my mother… Am I talking too long?

29:01 Brian Rose: No, I love this.

29:02 Gabor Maté: Can I blather on? Because I found my mother’s diary recently. When I was six weeks old, and this is 1944, my mother is writing: “My poor little Gabor, you’ve been crying since 3:00 in the morning. My heart broke for you, but I couldn’t pick you up to feed you until five o’clock, because the doctors would be so angry with me.” Because they’d learned to feed on schedule rather than on demand. “And I didn’t want to displease the doctors, so I had to let you cry for almost two hours. And finally, at quarter to five, my heart broke and I couldn’t do it anymore, and I picked you up and fed you. But don’t think I’ll do it again.”

29:41 Now, what’s the message to a six-week-old who’s desperate for maternal contact? And this woman who absolutely adored me, who did everything she could to save my life under very difficult circumstances, we’re talking about wartime Hungary, Nazi occupation, who absolutely loved me, and she’s absolutely hurting me at the same time. And just how confusing that is for the infant. Now, you tell a mother bear to ignore the crying of the infant, you tell a mother cat to ignore the crying of the infant. Every fiber in my mother’s being wanted to pick me up and nurture me, but the doctors had told her not to. And this is how we tell parents now how to parent. We tell them to sleep-train their kids by not picking them up. Hunter-gatherer tribes, you know what they do? They never even put their kids down. In the state of nature, creatures don’t put their kids down.

30:36 Brian Rose: Right. So stick to those fundamentals, and go with what’s in your gut as well. So when your kid has one of those tantrum moments, be with them, breathe with them, be with that.

30:48 Gabor Maté: Validate their feelings. You know, that doesn’t mean you’re permissive. The kid wants the cookie before dinner, and you know better. You don’t give him the cookie before dinner. But why shouldn’t he be angry about it? Why should I be threatened by his anger? Why should I call that naughty? Why should I call that the terrible twos? “Oh, you’re angry. You’re really upset. You really wanted that cookie. That’s okay. I’m so sorry. You know, after dinner.” So you’re not permissive, but you’re also not demanding that the child suppress their feelings in order to be in your presence.

31:24 Brian Rose: And you don’t hold the relationship as ransom to them.

31:28 Gabor Maté: That’s exactly it. You don’t use the relationship against them.

31:31 Brian Rose: Okay. One thing my wife does, with Kayden: he has a meltdown sometimes on the sidewalk next to traffic, he’s just gone. He melted down with me one time in the pool, and I mean he literally would have broken his skull against the side of the pool, he was banging so much. He’d lost all sense of his own safety. And so she just talks to him: “Okay, I know you’re really angry, Kayden.” And that might take five minutes, but she’s like, “Okay, I know you’re really angry, but we need to go. So I understand you’re angry.” And he’s like, “Ah!” And she just tries to talk, and then after a while he’s listening.

32:08 Gabor Maté: He’s hearing the tone. This is the whole point. He’s responding as much to the energy in the tone as to the words. And what she’s teaching him is self-regulation. She’s actually teaching him that you can go through these states, it’s okay, they’ll pass. And this is how self-regulation happens, not by “you mustn’t yell, you mustn’t…” and this kind of punitive and accusatory stuff. So your wife is doing intuitively what needs to be done.

32:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, she’s Bulgarian, so maybe a little further from the West. I think she’s more intuitive. But yeah, I think a couple of times we tried exploding when he explodes, and we quickly saw that did not work, like getting angry with him for melting down.

32:49 Gabor Maté: Well, what she’s doing is, instead of a timeout, she’s giving him a time-in. She’s actually giving him her energy and her concern and her presence at that time, which is exactly what the child needs. And that way he’ll learn self-regulation. Whereas when you react against his anger, you’re teaching him self-suppression, which is not the same as self-regulation.

33:15 Brian Rose: Okay. That’s really powerful, thank you for that. Also, I told you I’ve got a stepdaughter. When she was six, she’s now 14, and you said some interesting things about stepchildren and stepfathers earlier.

33:29 Gabor Maté: Well, step is an interesting word, because why do we call them stepparents? Because they step into the role of the parent. And in this book, Hold On to Your Kids, what we point out is that parenting is not a role, it’s a relationship. So sometimes, I don’t know how it was for you, but I’ve seen very often a stepparent steps into the role and expects deference and compliance and love from the child. But why should the child offer them? She didn’t ask you to marry her mother. That was her mother’s decision, maybe for perfectly valid reasons, but let’s not assume that the child is necessarily a party to it.

34:09 And if you want to step into the role of parenting, you have to develop the relationship where the child wants to belong to you, where the child’s attachment drive is directed towards you, and then you will be the parent. But let’s not assume that it’s a role where you simply start doing the right things without the relationship. And Krishnamurti, the great teacher, said that the most important thing is relationship. He said that without understanding relationship, any plan of action will only breed conflict. So it’s that relationship that we have to get.

34:51 So that six-year-old whose mother married you at that age has already been through a difficult time, because her parents divorced. Now, I don’t need to know the circumstances, but I can tell you, no adults divorce without a fair bit of unhappiness. I mean, no two happy parents wake up on a Saturday morning and say, “It’s been wonderful, I’m totally in love with you, goodbye.” You know, there’s usually a period of alienation and stress and struggle and rancor, and the child has to endure all that. And then the child has endured the loss, assuming that the father didn’t die or something, but one way or the other, the six-year-old has endured a loss. So she’s got some insecurity. I’m talking about the average case, I don’t know about your daughter.

35:40 But then you come along, and all of a sudden the mother forms a relationship with you. Why should that not be threatening to the child? She’s already lost something, and also this is a stranger in the home who Mommy really loves. Well, every reason she might perhaps perceive you as a threat. Now, maybe she didn’t. Maybe you formed a great relationship with her right from the beginning, and maybe she welcomed you into the home. But it can easily work the other way. And all I’m saying is we have to understand that the parent’s relationship with one another is not immediately transferable to the child. A relationship has to be built with the child, and that’s what then gives you the power to parent: the relationship that the child wants to have and maintain with you. The power of parenting comes from the desire of the child to belong to you, and this is whether you’re the stepparent or the biological parent.

36:38 Brian Rose: Okay, yeah. I remember the first time I met Gabby, and we went for ice cream, the three of us, and she was looking at me like, “Who the hell is this guy?” And then I think at one point I took a scoop of her mom’s ice cream and I ate it, and she said, “Why are you eating my mommy’s ice cream?” She clocked it right away.

37:00 Gabor Maté: Good for her.

37:01 Brian Rose: But when I finally really started seeing her mother a lot, I really made an effort, and I would actually just have dates where I would pick up Gabby alone, without her mom there, and we would go to the mall. And we really invested. Actually, when we moved in together, I asked her permission. I said, “Would you like to move in with us?” I took her out for a coffee, and I was like, “I really want you to, but it’s your call.” And then she was just like, “Yeah, okay.”

37:25 Gabor Maté: And you meant it, if she had said no?

37:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, well, I mean, we would have had a real problem, right? Maybe I would have had to go for a few more coffees, I don’t know. But I had a stepmother too, and so maybe I saw how she invested in me, and I understood that dynamic, and I ended up really getting close to her.

37:49 Tell me about social media, because my boys aren’t there yet, although they can find their way to a laptop pretty quick. But they’re not on social media, but my daughter is, of course. Obviously that peer group now is readily available in this new addictive device that’s more addictive, I don’t know if you would say, than heroin and cocaine. It’s very addictive. Does that just up the stakes?

38:18 Gabor Maté: Well, in Hold On to Your Kids, the last two chapters are about the digital media, and it’s a huge topic. And I would say, if I had boys your kids’ age, I would not let them near any device.

38:32 Brian Rose: Nothing near a device? That’s what I heard the Silicon Valley CEOs do. I heard that they tell their nannies they’re not to have a device; you have to leave it in your car.

38:39 Gabor Maté: That’s absolutely right. Not at that age. Because first of all, the screens themselves are mesmerizing, and they’re addictive. You try and peel a kid off their device, you see typical addictive protest and outrage.

38:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, anger, all that kind of stuff.

39:01 Gabor Maté: Because you’re coming between the addict and their addiction. And you know, from your own addictive history, or me from mine, what it’s like when somebody tries to come between you and your addictive target behavior.

39:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, everything in every fiber of your being says no.

39:20 Gabor Maté: Absolutely right. So first of all, the screens themselves affect the developing brain. So the more time the kid spends watching screens, the more it depletes their dopamine receptors, and dopamine receptors are the ones that get implicated in addiction, in the incentive motivation circuitry of the brain. Number one. The child develops an attachment relationship with the machine. And that’s with one-, two-, three- or four-year-olds.

39:57 So what we say about the digital media is, it’s a good thing, but so is sex and so is alcohol. But we don’t give two-year-olds alcohol, and we don’t introduce five-year-olds to sexual practices. Why? Because they’re not ready to handle it. So you give digital media to kids when they’re old enough to handle it. When are they old enough to handle it? When they no longer need to rely on that to meet their emotional needs, but they use it for the function for which it was developed, which is information and communication. Those are legitimate goals. But when kids are immature and their attachment needs have not been met yet, they can use the digital media to meet their attachment needs, which displaces real human attachments.

40:40 So what happens on Facebook? Kids have friends. What happens on Facebook? Kids like each other. These are attachment dynamics, except the friends are not real friends, because a real friend is somebody who really knows you intimately and accepts you and supports you and wants the best for you. These Facebook friendships are highly conditional, as shown by the fact that when people displease each other, they defriend each other. And the likes are not real likes, because what is being presented on digital media is a simulacrum of the real self. It’s a self-chosen particle of who I really am, and that’s what shows up on Facebook. And so people like a part of me, but how does that satisfy my need to be accepted and respected and loved for who I really am? It actually undermines it. So the digital media is the very opposite of genuine human connection.

41:46 Now, can it be used that way? Sure. If you’ve got two young kids now, and if you’ve got parents who live in the United States, then those kids want to connect with their grandparents. What a great device Skype is, or Zoom, where they can connect. It’s not just a letter. There was an article in the New York Times about a five-year-old who walks into his friend’s house, sees the computer and says, “Hey, Granddad,” because he’d only met his granddad, or mostly, through the screen. Anyway, that’s a great way to connect. But who needs to be in charge of that? In other words, the digital media can be introduced to a child’s life when the parents can stay in control of it. When the media takes over and the child has got this addictive relationship, the child is not ready for it. So we say don’t introduce it too early, number one, and number two, stay on top of it and be in charge.

42:38 Brian Rose: What kind of age are we talking here?

42:41 Gabor Maté: Well, we desist from giving a specific age, only because each child matures at a different rate. Eight, ten, twelve. As long as it’s under the direction of the parents.

42:52 Brian Rose: Okay. When Gabby started school, in the equivalent of seventh grade, they gave all the girls iPads. That was the policy of this private school here in London. And we were like, “Are you sure?” And they’re like, “That’s how we teach now. Everything goes on there.” And they monitor them, they do the Wi-Fi thing. But you’re not impressed with that.

43:12 Gabor Maté: I’m not impressed, because my guess is that very quickly that iPad became a vehicle for social media and peer relationships rather than the educational intent of it. And real teaching happens through personal contact, through engagement, through inviting and eliciting the kid’s curiosity, through appealing to the child’s increasingly sophisticated mind to hold complex ideas and contradictions. And at the same time, those depend on maturation, and maturation depends on relationship with human beings.

43:54 So I think if I was running the education system, I would introduce computers maybe in grade 11 or 12. And kids wouldn’t have missed anything, because they can pick it up like that.

44:05 Brian Rose: So, writing things longhand?

44:10 Gabor Maté: Still make them do mathematics, which would make their brains do work. I would have them define their own educational goals. I would have them do research that doesn’t appear at the click of a thumb. Go to the library. They have the world library, and they have to look it up and get a sense of what it’s like to really look for something. And then you give them the tools: “Oh, now you can do this stuff, here’s a much easier way to do it.” But it’s not about the teaching, it’s about what helps a human being develop into an autonomous, curious, self-motivated, individuated human being. And virtually everything about digital media undermines those qualities.

44:51 Brian Rose: Right, yeah. I think about my great teachers, and maybe even a jiu-jitsu teacher. I mean, it’s like these great Chinese martial arts movies: “Snatch the pebble from my hand.” They give you challenges you can’t figure out. They always know how to dial it in and how to push you.

45:13 Gabor Maté: That’s a relationship. It’s a relational interaction, absolutely, not about information. And again, this is with full respect for the power of the media and the value and the amazing services it can provide. I’m not denying that. There’s no point being a Luddite about it. It’s just a question of recognizing where in child development it actually fits in, and where it’s going to be a support and not a detriment. And in this society it’s gone rampant. And then you even see, I mean in Vancouver I see this, I’m sure you see it in London, the parent is pushing a kid in the pram, and what’s the parent doing? Interacting with their cell phone. What’s the message to the kid? “I’m not important.”

46:05 Brian Rose: Right. Okay, I’m going to tell my wife right now to get all the devices out of the house. I want to talk a bit about my addictions in the movie, but you mentioned your addictions a few minutes ago. What are your addictions, or what were they?

46:21 Gabor Maté: Well, my shopping addiction I’ve written about and talked about, but my major addiction, at least the one I’ve had to deal with most recently, as I’ve already mentioned, is to work. And you see, I like who I am at work. I like this conversation. I like who I am being right here. I’m being calm and, I hope, fairly articulate and intelligent, and I’m enjoying my relationship and contact with you. This is a great place to be. Why wouldn’t it be addictive? It’s much more difficult at home, and especially if I work so much that I get myself depleted and my mind is so full of the work stuff. So I go on holiday and it’s still dominating my thinking. I’ve got a problem, and I now recognize it as the addiction that it is.

47:09 And again, as I said before, I know from our previous conversation and from your movie that your core issue has always been a sense of adequacy or inadequacy. Am I enough? And that “am I enough” is a question that comes out of trauma. And the work is so seductive precisely because it’s so appreciated by the world. I mean, I don’t know how much time you spend on your work, but if you spent double the amount, the world would love you even more. Your kids would miss you, and your wife would hate you, but the world would think what an even greater guy Brian Rose is, because he’s so present and so available and so energetic and so giving. Well, that’s my story. So there’s something addictive about that. If I think I’m not enough, then I want more validation from the world that I’m enough. And so that’s been my major one, and it’s an ongoing challenge.

48:18 Brian Rose: For anyone who thinks they suffer from the same workaholism, what are some of the things they can do, or ask themselves, to make sure that’s the problem? What do you advise people?

48:32 Gabor Maté: Well, my question with any addiction is, first of all, what is the benefit? What do you get from it? I get a sense of importance, I get a sense of being wanted. Okay, where did you lose that sense? So I ask them to go to the trauma. Where did they lose the sense that they’re good enough just as they are, without having to do anything? Which is the same question you raised at the end of your movie, by the way. And the second question is, what is the impact on your life? So if I’m honest about it, the impact on my life has been depletion and fatigue, depression when I’m not working, reactivity, and I would say an adversarial relationship with the person I love the most in the world, my wife. Lack of inner peace. These are heavy prices to pay.

49:34 So first of all, empathetically get in touch with yourself and find out what it’s doing for you that you like, and acknowledge that yes, we all need to feel important, we all want to feel that we belong, that we have a place in this world. Those are good things. It’s just that that particular modality will not get it for you. And then look at the impact, and if you see that the impact is more than you want to pay for the benefit, now you have the motivation to make some changes.

50:10 Brian Rose: Right. And that happened for you in London a year and a half ago.

50:11 Gabor Maté: And that’s happened for me again and again. But it happened in London a year and a half ago in a way that I could no longer escape it.

50:20 Brian Rose: Right.

50:21 Gabor Maté: And when I’ve had a backslide, and I have, then the karma is instant. Like John Lennon’s “Instant Karma’s gonna get you.”

50:32 Brian Rose: You feel it right away, or your wife tells you right away?

50:33 Gabor Maté: Both.

50:38 Brian Rose: Okay, it’s good you have that. That accountability is very important. You know, I found when I was in this bachelor life, back in my banking days, and deeper into my alcohol addiction, that there was just no accountability, which kept me alienated and made me feel there was no purpose. And I got into this nihilistic tailspin. It was just a downward spiral. And then, as you say in the film, at some point somebody offered you heroin.

51:04 Gabor Maté: And that was the next step.

51:07 Brian Rose: That was the next step. So let’s talk about the film. The film is called Iron Mind. Anyone can watch it on our website. And I basically hijacked you and put you in the movie, based on our last interview.

51:24 Gabor Maté: I was terribly upset.

51:25 Brian Rose: So thank you for that, I really appreciate it. And for people that don’t know the movie, from a bird’s-eye perspective, it’s about a guest coming on the show, John Joseph, the lead singer of the Cro-Mags, 56-year-old former punk rocker, former Hare Krishna, vegan, who is now doing Ironman…

51:42 Gabor Maté: Reformed addict.

51:45 Brian Rose: Former addict, former drug dealer, sexually abused as a child, a lot of formers. And with ten Ironman races, full Ironman races, which is double the race that I went on, 12-hour races, under his belt, he comes to my studio, basically gets me to go back to New York, because he feels there’s some unfinished business with me there, and then challenges me to do an Ironman race, swim, bike and run, which is like a six-hour affair, in 90 days. And as my trainer tells me, it usually takes a year to prepare for.

52:20 Gabor Maté: Correct, yeah.

52:25 Brian Rose: So it’s quite a challenge, and we go through this whole piece. And while I’m training in New York City, these demons kind of come out. There’s a part in the sequence where I’m training on a bike and I go into a state of physical exhaustion, and I was actually crying on that bike. It looks like I’m sweating, but I was crying, and my whole crew freaked out. They’d never seen me cry before. And I was literally kind of falling apart while I was there in New York. And I was in the village where I was first offered heroin and I lived in this heroin addiction.

53:01 And the interview we use is of me and you talking, on the surface, about my alcoholism, but there was also a heroin addiction mixed in there. And so the movie addresses those issues. And there’s a part where you come in, where we do what you do with your work, and we say, okay, most people would say, “Oh, you had the problem and you got over it.” And we go deeper and say, “Okay, let’s go back to the trauma.” And so we visit my trauma and briefly talk about it.

53:34 Gabor Maté: If I make a comment here: there’s something in the film where you say, “John had much more to deal with than I did.” And I thought, there’s no comparing traumas. Let me ask you this question. How old were you? I think you were five or seven, and you’re conscious of having experienced trauma, is that right?

54:02 Brian Rose: Seven was the divorce event itself.

54:03 Gabor Maté: Fair enough. So at that time. Let’s take your children. How old is your eldest? One, two years old? Well, let’s say he’s five years old, and let’s say you and his mother are getting divorced, but before the divorce there’s a lot of tension and stress and strain in the home, and your five-year-old comes to you and says, “Daddy, I’m so unhappy and I’m so stressed and I’m so sad and I’m so scared and I’m so angry because you guys are fighting.” Would you say to him, “You think this is bad? Think about the trauma that John Joseph went through when he was a kid, when he was sexually abused”? Would you say that to your five-year-old?

54:46 Brian Rose: No, I wouldn’t say that to him.

54:47 Gabor Maté: Why wouldn’t you say that?

54:49 Brian Rose: Well, because he wouldn’t understand that. He’s living in his world, and in his world this is traumatic.

54:56 Gabor Maté: And it would be uncompassionate to say it. But you say it to yourself in the film. And so I thought, Brian, you’re comparing traumas, which is inherently unfair to you. You can’t compare traumas. Each person’s trauma is their own, and the pain is real, and to say that somebody else’s is greater pain is utterly meaningless. And we would never do it to other people. We only do it to ourselves.

55:25 Brian Rose: Well, I appreciate that. When I wrote an email, because we put this out as a weekly video series as well, and I think it was the third part, where we just came clean about the heroin, I wrote, “I finally wrote this story about my shameful past.” And you watched the show, and I really appreciate that you wrote back, and you said, “I disagree that it’s shameful.” And that was a really powerful moment, for you to say that, and I appreciate that. And that was a really hard email to write.

55:55 This happened in New York. I hadn’t told my wife about it, and I came back, we made the episode, and then I showed it to her at home. It’s the first time she ever heard about this from me. And then I said, “Maybe I have to send this email out.” And she’s just like, “Tell the world. Tell them everything.” So she scooped it out. It took like three days on the email. And it’s been one of the greatest things I’ve ever done. I never thought that this deep, dark, black hole of my life would ever have any positive meaning, ever. I always thought it was just this really bad time and it would always be this dark hole. Now it’s actually this amazing source of light.

56:32 Gabor Maté: Well, and your friend John says that in the film. I think at some point he says something about the addiction and all this suffering, it’s been a great gift, because you’ve learned so much from it. You know, I was speaking today to a journalist here in London, and she had breast cancer, and she said that was the greatest gift she had. Now, I don’t recommend heroin addiction or breast cancer to anybody. It’s only that when they happen, and if we work our way through them, we actually get the gift of what they teach us: the truth about ourselves. And that truth, that light, is the greatest gift there is.

57:09 Brian Rose: Yeah. I appreciate you saying that, as far as one person’s trauma isn’t more or less than the other’s. I mean, Viktor Frankl said that people’s problems are like gas in a chamber: it fills up the room. Whatever the problem you have, it is big to each one, whatever its severity.

57:26 Right. Is it possible to raise your children without trauma? That’s what I’m always wondering, because people are people, and relationships happen and life happens. I mean, is it really possible to keep them in this wonderful loving bubble for seven years?

57:38 Gabor Maté: Well, they don’t need a wonderful loving bubble. What they need is reality. And trauma is not the fact that you have pain or sadness. That’s not trauma. Trauma is when you’re alone with your pain and sadness, so you can’t process it and move through it. So if you’re asking, can we protect children from pain? Probably not. Life is inherently painful, for some much more than for others. But there’s loss: there’s the kid that won’t invite you to his birthday party, there’s granddad who might not want to spend time with you, there’s the ice cream cone that you dropped, and you really wish you hadn’t dropped it, you’ve lost it, it’s in the dust, you’re not going to have it. So there’s losses, there’s disappointments, there’s rejections, there is sadness.

58:30 You can’t protect children from that, nor should you try to. What you can do, though, is help them experience it accompanied by a nurturing adult, so that they learn that they can handle it and that there’s support in this world. So trauma isn’t what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you. And the primary aspect of trauma is that the person who was traumatized is alone with their difficult emotions. So your parents could have had the divorce, but had you not been alone with how you felt, you would not have been traumatized. But the fact is there was nobody for you to talk to about it. By that time you’d learned that you’re alone in this. That’s what causes the trauma.

59:24 So yes, it’s possible to raise kids without trauma, although in this stressed society it’s very difficult to do so. And look, I mean, if you look at your own country, or at least your country of origin, the US, they have now elevated a highly traumatized person to be their leader. So this is a highly traumatized society.

59:46 Brian Rose: Is that what you see in him?

59:50 Gabor Maté: Oh, yeah. The Buddha said that with our minds we create the world. Now, if I think the world is a benign place, where there is trouble but support, there is good and evil, there’s possibility, there is love, I live in a very different world than if I believe that the world is a horrible place. And what kind of world do I live in if I believe the world is a horrible place? Well, who do I have to be? I have to be grandiose, build myself up as powerful as I can be, even exaggerate my size so that other people will be intimidated. I have to be aggressive, I have to be selfish, I have to be acquisitive, and I have to be paranoid and suspicious. In other words, I have to be the President of the United States. Because Trump believes that the world is a horrible place.

1:00:44 Now, what the Buddha didn’t say is that before, with the mind, we create the world, the world creates our minds. And if you look at his childhood, that’s what you see: a father who was demeaning and humiliating and attacking and aggressive, a mother who was ineffective in protecting her kids. One of his brothers drank himself to death. And Trump survived by scattering his attention, by tuning out. He’s got severe ADHD. He can’t finish a page of a memo. He has got no impulse regulation. He wakes up at 3:00 in the morning and has to tweet. He can’t hold anything in. And he is an angry, jealous, fearful man with zero self-concept, which causes him to make himself as grandiose as possible. He has to prove that more people came to my party than came to Barack’s party, his predecessor. It’s on that level.

1:01:50 So he’s a deeply traumatized guy, and this is the man that the most powerful country in the world elevated to the most powerful position in the land. So what does that speak about the nature of the society? This is a highly traumatized society, and so it’s difficult in this traumatized world to raise children who are not traumatized.

1:02:09 Brian Rose: Right, it’s difficult. It’s a real challenge.

1:02:11 Gabor Maté: What they need is adult relationships that are there.

1:02:12 Brian Rose: And they can talk to them, communicate through those things. That’s right. Because yeah, I was quite alone with those feelings. And I’ve analyzed myself more after this, and I think at first I was kind of looking for that love and acceptance, and I think at some point I put a cap on it, to where even when people would give me love, I would no longer accept it. And so I was in this kind of endless cycle of trying to get the love but not receiving it.

1:02:40 Gabor Maté: Oh, I know that one. It doesn’t matter how many people have written to me or communicated their gratitude or the love for what I do or for myself, it means nothing to me personally until I can open up to some internal source of love. I mean, ultimately we’re the only ones that can give it to ourselves as adults. Until then, everybody else’s, we just dismiss.

1:03:04 I have a question for you, if I may. Just at the end of the film, as I mentioned before, you’re in conversation with John Joseph, your mentor and your competitor really, in this Ironman race, and you ask him a number of times, actually: “Well, is this enough? I mean, now that I’ve done this, have I just switched one addiction for another? Do I have to keep doing this to validate myself?” It’s not clear what you say at the end. You kind of leave it open. So where are you with that? So you’ve done this great Ironman thing, and you put yourself through the hero’s journey. You went back to the site of your suffering and your dysfunction, and you achieved something that you didn’t think was in you, and that was celebrated by yourself and a lot of other people. But then, having come to the end of the film, you ask yourself this question.

1:04:11 “Is this enough, or do I still have to keep proving my value?” And his answer is, “Yes, you have to keep proving, and you have to provide yourself with a challenge.” I’m not going to say what my answer is, but I’m curious: have you come further in answering that question of yours? Because you don’t answer it in the film.

1:04:28 Brian Rose: Yeah, we kind of leave it open, as well as with him and the forgiveness issue as well. I’d like your thoughts on that too. But yeah, so when I got into this Ironman culture, you realize that you can see kind of addictive tendencies here.

1:04:46 Gabor Maté: Well, your friend says that the kind of people drawn to this are people who have a lot of work to do on themselves.

1:04:53 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s what he says, a lot of deep work to do on themselves. And then I see the people there, and there’s recovering alcoholics, and there’s people for whom these are their only friends and family, and this is the bond. And then you look at John. I mean, he’s 56 years old and he’s done ten of these things, and right after the race, I mean literally I’m still sweating profusely, he says, “We’re signing up for a full,” which is double the one I just did, in ten months or whatever. And it was like six months later, and the trainer is saying the same thing: “Why don’t we do the full?” Because she’s obviously a triathlon addict.

1:05:29 So I called John, because there’s something I noticed, and I said, “Well, guys like us that are always doing this stuff, when’s enough? And when’s the time to just be?” Because also your interview with me put that really in context. It’s like, “Well, Brian, you’re searching for validation from other people. It’s never going to be enough until you can just be, and not have to be somebody.” And so John, without missing a beat, has his position. He’s kind of in his mantra zone, where he’s like, “Yes, of course, that’s how I learn, that’s how we grow.” And you can tell me what you think about that later.

1:06:03 What have I just realized? Well, I’m not yet addicted to Ironman, so to say that I’m not doing another Ironman as me being in control would not be fair. But am I addicted to my next accomplishment? Definitely. And that’s my workaholism as well. I have similar problems I’m dealing with as you, and you’re right, the sacrifice is your wife and your children, and for some people their health and all that. I’ve managed to kind of engineer that into my workday. Maybe there’s some other things I’m forgetting. But yeah, this is a big question for me, even though I know it’s part of my character. Changing it is another story. And so I’m aware of it. I’m trying to be more present and be more content with what I am.

1:06:52 Gabor Maté: Let me interrupt you. I’m sorry. Not sorry. You just said “trying.” Do you want to analyze that? We’re trying to… Okay, so this is an exercise I do in my workshops. I’m going to ask you to try to stand up.

1:07:08 Brian Rose: Okay, so I understand. Try to stand up. So there is no trying to stand up. I understand. You either stand up or you don’t. No trying. So I’m basically still lying to myself, that I’m trying. But how will I know when I’m no longer a workaholic?

1:07:25 Gabor Maté: Rather than trying to be something that you’re not, just acknowledge how it is for you. Just keep acknowledging it and keep looking at the impact. And if you’re not sure about the impact, talk to your wife, and she’ll let you know.

1:07:46 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah.

1:07:48 Gabor Maté: So don’t try to be anything. You know that’s inauthentic. You might as well just go back to that first step, acknowledging your powerlessness over it right now, and then see where you can go from there. But trying… I know, look, I’m speaking from bitter experience. It’s not like I’m criticizing what you’re doing. I just know that it doesn’t work. So the trying is really a self-delusion.

1:08:25 Brian Rose: So let me hit you with another angle, and maybe you’ve heard this from other addicts before. But my obsession is why we’re sitting here together today, which I think is a wonderful thing, regardless of whether the cameras are on or off right now. And the fact that they’re on means that this could help a lot of people, et cetera. So is that a way of an addict justifying his behavior, or is that something I have to kind of also honor, and say some amount of obsessive behavior or workaholism created something that has a greater good?

1:08:54 Gabor Maté: Well, so here’s a question. Is it true about you that you’re genuinely interested in transformation?

1:09:01 Brian Rose: Yes.

1:09:02 Gabor Maté: Is it true about you that you’re genuinely committed to helping people become enlightened?

1:09:05 Brian Rose: Yes.

1:09:06 Gabor Maté: Is it true about you that you resonate with the suffering in the world and you’d like to alleviate it?

1:09:17 Brian Rose: Yes, those are all true.

1:09:18 Gabor Maté: That’s the real you. The obsession is optional. You don’t have to be obsessed to do all those things. That’s your true nature. That would not diminish one iota if you gave up your obsession. It would just make you more effective at what you do, because the obsession will no longer be depleting you and diverting you. So I think I hear the fear, or the concern, behind your question, which is that if I give up the obsession, I give up this great work that I’m doing. No. If you give up the obsession, if you’re able to let go of it, you’ll just be that much more present and conscious and effective at what you do, even more so than you are now. So the obsession is not equivalent to your genuine human commitment.

1:10:09 Brian Rose: I’m going to meditate on that. Okay. And did you have any other thoughts on the end of that movie? A lot of people reacted strongly to John not forgiving his abusers. That was a big thing. Some people were with John, some people were not with John, and it was a weird way that we ended the movie, but it was real and honest. He hasn’t forgiven, so why should he pretend? He was very honest about it. He said if he met them, he’d beat them.

1:10:36 Gabor Maté: Yes. Well, first of all, all deference to John, who’s a hero, genuinely. So I have a lot of admiration for him, just because he keeps going, and he triumphs over his demons. Now, the trouble is, he still sees himself as in a battle. You recall he talks about the last mile: “I’m crying because you **** didn’t get me.” So he’s still carrying his abusers in his mind. He hasn’t let go of them yet. In that sense, they’re still winning. When he’s doing his last mile and crying because he’s beating those ****, those **** are still winning. But that’s the first point.

1:11:26 The second point is, and I hope he’ll see this as a support for him, because I’m not trying to analyze him to put him down, I just want to see what’s true about him: he hasn’t yet dealt with his trauma. Because his trauma was not the sexual abuse at the hands of those two guys in that house. Because the next question I would ask him, if he was here in my presence, I would ask him, “John, when that happened, who did you talk to about it?” What do you think he would say?

1:11:59 Brian Rose: Nobody.

1:12:01 Gabor Maté: Exactly. He was alone by then. And those two guys that did it to him knew that about him already, because the perpetrators have laser vision as to who is available and who is not. And when I say available, I don’t mean desirous or deserving of that kind of abuse. I’m talking about the kid who lacks the protection. So the trauma was his loss of connection to the nurturing adults in his life. That is the primary trauma that made the secondary trauma of the sexual abuse possible.

1:12:32 Brian Rose: Okay. And being put into foster care doesn’t help that, of course. It’s like an exponential disassociation from any adults.

1:12:44 Gabor Maté: Absolutely. And if you look at the statistics in the foster care system in the US, the outcomes are disasters in terms of addiction, mental illness, illegal behaviors, sexually transmitted disease, everything else. So when I say he’s a hero, he really has had that enormous suffering, and he really has come a long way to pull himself out of it. But his journey is not complete yet. That’s all I would say about him.

1:13:12 Now, in terms of forgiveness, there’s no onus to forgiveness. I never demand anybody forgive anything. But until he heals his trauma, he can’t forgive. Because the end of trauma is when you realize that there’s nothing wrong with you. If there’s nothing wrong with you, then nothing bad happened. If nothing bad happened, there are no perpetrators. So forgiveness for me is never a goal. Forgiveness is not something that anybody does. If I was here last time on your show and you said something to me that made me unhappy, and I came on this show and I said, “Brian, I forgive you,” you know what that would mean? It would mean I haven’t forgiven you at all. It’s still on my mind, and I’m being magnanimous about it: “I’m such a great man, I’m being magnanimous.” So forget forgiveness. Forgiveness happens or it doesn’t happen.

1:14:08 The goal should be healing. When healing happens, the forgiveness either comes spontaneously or it doesn’t come. And if it doesn’t come, if you need to be angry at those people for the rest of your life, by all means, if that’s what’s there for you, be authentic to it. And in that sense he’s being real, and there’s nothing about what he said that upsets me. All I’m saying is that his healing could be more complete than it is so far.

1:14:35 Brian Rose: And how would he go about doing that?

1:14:37 Gabor Maté: Well, that’s whatever his path is, whatever calls to him. More Ironman races are keeping him going, and they’re a great support to him. But is he still going to be doing Ironmans when he’s 89? Probably not. And then what’s he going to do? Or God forbid he suffers some physical disability, and the Ironman is how he does it. Then what’s he going to do? So I’m hoping. He’s come a long way and he’s a bright guy. I fully believe he’s got the internal resources, but I would say he’s got further to go. By the way, welcome, John: Brian and I also have further to go. So it’s not like you’re alone in the club of having more work to do. That’s just what I saw in the film.

1:15:32 Brian Rose: Okay. And so to address that trauma, he has to go back and talk to someone about these things, and try to get to a point where he can deal with that, or make peace with that?

1:15:47 Gabor Maté: So first of all, he doesn’t have to do anything. I’m just giving you what I see. If he is actually comfortable and happy with his life, and feels at peace and at ease, he won’t be motivated to do anything. So the first question I would ask him, if I were to talk to him personally, like with anybody, is just how authentically comfortable are you with yourself and how your life is going? And if there’s discomfort, if there’s some element of dissatisfaction there, then I would say now that’s worth exploring. But if he insists that he’s perfectly happy the way he is, I’m not here to tell him that he’s not. I’m just talking general principles.

1:16:31 Brian Rose: But if he did want to, he could start to talk to someone about it.

1:16:35 Gabor Maté: Talking to somebody would be one way he could do it. There’s other modes of therapy. He lives in New York. I know people in New York who do this talking therapy. There’s therapies that bypass talking. And John is quite a talker, and very articulate in his jazzy, kind of funky kind of way. And so I would say, for him, maybe some non-talk therapy would be more effective.

1:17:01 Brian Rose: Such as?

1:17:03 Gabor Maté: Well, such as EMDR, such as brainspotting, such as somatic experiencing, or such as psychedelic work. All of these modalities bypass talking and get you deeper into your unexamined psyche.

1:17:21 Brian Rose: Is that better sometimes for someone who is very good at talking and articulate?

1:17:25 Gabor Maté: I’m so bloody good at talking, I could talk my way around therapists all the time. And so probably could he. And so you need therapists, or to work with people, who are not impressed with what you have to say and with your mind, but who can see the person underneath the persona. And he’s got a very, very strong persona.

1:17:53 Brian Rose: Yeah. He’s a tough, tough-talking, biggest **** on the block, how would I put it. And that’s tough to crack sometimes.

1:18:01 Gabor Maté: It’s tough to crack, because that’s an identity you’re holding on to really hard. He’s got a strong identity, and I have my own version of it, and so do you.

1:18:07 Brian Rose: Yeah, I know. And again, we’re not judging anyone here. We’re making observations, and we have our own things that we’re dealing with personally. It’s interesting, though, a lot of these guys that have gone sober, like John, like Rich Roll, who was on my show, for them, a psychedelic like ayahuasca is, “Oh no, no, no, that’s a drug.” John’s had that reaction. I think he knew I went down for my ceremonies a few months ago. But for them, that’s their kind of knee-jerk reaction: “I can’t do the drug.” And that’s how they maybe avoid that.

1:18:42 Gabor Maté: Well, I can see where that comes from. I mean, for these guys, substances were their downfall, and now we’re saying, “Here’s a substance, this is going to help you.” So they don’t see the logic. But there’s a fundamental misperception that they have, which is that it’s not the substance, it’s what they call the set and the setting. The set being your mindset, your intention. Now, what was his intention when he was using heroin? It was to numb himself, to escape from life. The intention when you do a plant ceremony is to awaken more, to have more insight, more life rather than less. It’s not to disconnect but to connect. So that’s the set.

1:19:21 The setting for the heroin use was some dingy bar or back alley, or some room with a bunch of buddies who wanted to get strung out. The setting for ceremony is trained shamans who’ve been through training that’s not for the faint-hearted. They’ve faced their devils and they’ve been through it. And the setting is maybe a psychologically trained guide, like I would say myself in that context, I can do that kind of work. And the setting is other people on a healing journey who are there to support your own healing, and who are willing to accept you and work with you and be with you. So the set and the setting, the intention and the context, are totally different, and therefore the experience is totally different. Number one.

1:20:06 Number two, the heroin he was using daily, regularly, as a form of escape. Ayahuasca, if that’s what we’re talking about, you don’t use daily. You use it very consciously, in a ceremonial setting, as a way of opening the doors of perception. It’s still up to you to walk through those doors, and walking through those doors is something you have to do in your daily life. So it’s not going to happen for you right there in the ceremony. In the ceremony you might have an opening which otherwise you might not have had, and you might have realized things about your past and your true nature that hitherto had been hidden to you. But that’s just when the work begins. So I’m not here to talk anybody into it. It’s not for everybody, and if somebody’s not called to do it, there’s a million other ways of working. All I’m saying is that to conflate this substance use with that substance use is a misperception.

1:21:05 Brian Rose: Right. And you were an early adopter of using plant medicines like ayahuasca and iboga for your mostly heroin patients in Vancouver.

1:21:15 Gabor Maté: I wasn’t there early. By the time I wrote my book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, on addiction, which came out in North America ten years ago this year, I knew nothing about ayahuasca. So I was a fairly late comer. In fact, it was when I was talking about this book and addiction and trauma that people kept asking me what I knew about addiction and the healing of it through these plants, and I said I know nothing. And then I found out. When I experienced it myself, then I could see the potential value, and that’s when I began to work with it.

1:21:54 Now, active heroin users should not go to an ayahuasca ceremony. That’s not for them. They need to deal with that first. However, there’s this other plant that you mentioned, called iboga, which can make an active heroin user into a non-user overnight, which is astonishing but true. Somehow it works with the brain circuits. It’s an African plant. It supplies you with the endorphins, so you don’t need to get the opiate.

1:22:27 Brian Rose: You must have been shocked to see that.

1:22:28 Gabor Maté: It was a real surprise. Now again, it’s no panacea, because what iboga can do, and it’s obvious, is to take away the withdrawal symptoms. So literally, you’ve been on heroin for twenty years and you do iboga over two nights. It’s not mild stuff, it’s not for the faint-hearted, and you really have to use it in the right conditions, with guides who are very well trained, and you have to be medically screened for it.

1:22:58 Brian Rose: Have you done it?

1:23:00 Gabor Maté: Yeah.

1:23:01 Brian Rose: What’s it like?

1:23:02 Gabor Maté: It’s a very heavy experience.

1:23:04 Brian Rose: It’s very, very intense. It’s very present. You’re very present and everything is very magnified, as opposed to the ayahuasca, where you’re kind of in this other world zone.

1:23:19 Gabor Maté: You know, I have to confess, I’m a very poor psychedelic user. So I can lead people into these experiences and have great effects, and I myself sit there watching what’s going on with them, because I don’t get those effects myself. So even with the iboga, I went through this really heavy experience, but I still don’t know what the hell hit me.

1:23:40 Brian Rose: It’s hard to describe.

1:23:41 Gabor Maté: It’s hard to describe. But having said that, I’ve seen people who are dependent on heroin do iboga, and they have no withdrawal symptoms. Now, the problem is not solved, because there was a good reason they used heroin in the first place, which is the childhood trauma, and the trauma they’ve been carrying doesn’t go away just because you’re not using heroin. Now the work begins. But at least you’re not hooked on heroin anymore. So that’s what iboga can do. So what I’ve seen is people do the iboga to stop the heroin and then use the ayahuasca as a way of psychologically getting to know themselves and working through that trauma.

1:24:23 Brian Rose: Okay. Ideally fairly directly afterwards? Within days, weeks?

1:24:30 Gabor Maté: Weeks, yeah. Again, we’re talking ideal here, because these modalities are not cheap, and the average downtrodden drug user can’t afford them. And especially because, in their wisdom, governments have made these modalities illegal in the Western countries, so people have to do it illicitly. It’s not cheap, or they have to travel to Latin America where it’s not illegal, and again, that’s a lot of money. So a lot of the people who need these and could benefit from these modalities don’t actually have access to them. That’s just the truth, and that’s a shame.

1:25:11 Brian Rose: It’s evolution, right?

1:25:14 Gabor Maté: And again, it’s not a panacea, because if they don’t address the trauma, ultimately that’s the issue.

1:25:19 Brian Rose: And that’s another thing you maintain. You’re saying trauma doesn’t just cause addictive behavior, but all addictive behavior can be traced back to childhood trauma. That’s something you assert in your books.

1:25:30 Gabor Maté: Yeah. I formulate it as: not everybody who was traumatized becomes addicted, but everyone addicted was traumatized. So there’s other outcomes to trauma, addiction being one of them. But there’s nobody I’ve ever met, read about or interviewed, and I’ve talked to tens of thousands of people, who was addicted who did not have some childhood trauma. Childhood trauma which does not have to be overt. It does not have to be dramatic. It doesn’t have to be the Second World War and genocide, as in my case. It doesn’t even have to be a divorce, as in your case. It doesn’t have to be sexual abuse, as it was in John’s case. It can simply be when your needs aren’t met and you have to constrict yourself as a result. And trauma simply means a wound. It’s an unhealed wound. And I’m saying that all addictions are responses to unhealed wounds.

1:26:33 Brian Rose: Do people refute you on that claim, that addiction all comes from trauma? Do you find that you argue with people about that?

1:26:40 Gabor Maté: Well, first of all, I avoid argument. I mean, I don’t avoid debate, but there are some people ideologically committed. There’s a psychologist online, who shall remain unnamed here, who has taken it upon himself to attack me repeatedly for my trauma perspective. I’ve met the guy. He’s deeply traumatized and in absolute denial about his own trauma, so he attacks my view because he doesn’t deal with his own pain. That’s my take on it. But there are such people.

1:27:17 The problem is, as I’ve said this many times, the average medical student doesn’t even hear the word trauma in all their years of education. They need not an hour, not one lecture, but at least a year’s course in trauma studies. They really need to understand how trauma affects the personality, a person’s worldview, a person’s sense of themselves, a person’s neurophysiology, and the person’s relationship with other people. They need to understand how people adapt to trauma, and how those adaptations become a source of pathology later on. All this should be taught in the medical schools as a matter of sheer science. This is not my conjecture, it’s not my theory, it’s simply what science shows.

1:28:10 And what I’m saying about the medical schools is they ignore the trauma. And my next book, which will be entitled The Myth of Normal: Illness and Health in a Toxic Culture, will have a chapter on what I call the trauma-phobic profession, which is the medical profession. Why is the medical profession trauma-phobic? Because some of them are driven characters like me, and they need the badge and the white coat and the status to hide their own insecurities behind, and the sense of authority and power that they get. I know that game, and it’s difficult and painful to look at that.

1:28:47 Brian Rose: Will this ever change? Will this be taught in medical school, in your opinion?

1:28:51 Gabor Maté: I don’t know, except I meet more and more doctors who are looking at it, and more and more physicians who are willing to speak about their own stuff. But the institutions, of course, are invested in a certain way of doing things, and institutions are designed not to change. They’re designed to maintain the status quo.

1:29:13 Brian Rose: Right. Yeah. You mentioned the ayahuasca earlier, and I had three ceremonies in July. And like you said, it is a great way to kind of open yourself up to some ideas, some internal feelings, and some things that you normally might have a hard time seeing in your normal everyday life. But it really is about what you do afterwards, and it’s kind of a daily practice. And sometimes you can actually have a bit of a depression afterwards, because you realize that these things you saw as truths are absent from you, and you can’t manifest them as quickly. And also, you come back and you try to tell everyone else, “I’ve seen the light.” I came back to my wife: “This is what I saw, this is where we’re going.” And everyone’s like, “What are you talking about?”

1:30:00 Gabor Maté: Well, you know, I was in Cork, Ireland, earlier this year, and I met a woman there who had multiple diseases: diabetes and autoimmune conditions and depression. And she said, “Well, what can I do to heal?” And I said, “Well, try the plant work.” I just intuited it would be good for her. She said she couldn’t afford it. So I have a wealthy supporter who gives me money to sponsor other people’s healing. It’s a bit of a luxury that way. So I sponsored her to go to Costa Rica, very close to where you went. And she wrote me back a couple of months ago. I could show you the email. It’s astonishing. She said, “I don’t take medication anymore. I’m not depressed. I don’t have to have ADHD medications. My blood work is normal.” But, as she says, “I’m not going to tell anybody about it for six months, until I see that it lasts.”

1:30:57 And that’s my advice. Don’t blab and talk about it. Live it, be it. Everybody in your life is going to see it if it’s real. If it’s not real, they’re just going to look at you like a hypocrite or a self-deluded person. So when you come back from these great insights, shut up about it. Live it, incorporate it into your life, have a daily practice around it. But the last thing you should do is to talk about it and tell anybody how great it was, let alone try to convert them. Because the evangelism, I understand it: you have this great experience and you want to enroll the whole world. But you haven’t yet integrated it inside yourself. That’s what I’ve learned over and over and over again. So first integrate. Everybody who cares about you and who sees you will recognize the difference. They’ll want to know about it, and that’s the time to tell them.

1:31:49 Brian Rose: Really good advice. Yeah, very good advice on that. People call you the people whisperer sometimes. What does that mean?

1:31:56 Gabor Maté: Well, look, we all have our gifts, and I have a gift for reading people and being able to speak with them in a fairly gentle way, when I’m present, which is not always, that penetrates deeply, and people open up and they can look at themselves compassionately. And I think that’s what it means. So when I’m present and grounded in myself, for which I have to do the work to keep myself that way, but when I am that way, somebody can come to me and they can very quickly drill down to their issues. It doesn’t take years and months or weeks or even days of talking. We can just get down to what really matters.

1:32:51 Brian Rose: Do you still do one-on-one therapy?

1:32:54 Gabor Maté: Very rarely, because of lack of time, and I can’t commit to the long-term therapy of anybody. And again, when the wife says no, she says, “There’s not enough time in your life.” And there isn’t. So occasionally I take somebody on very briefly. If I believe that one or two conversations can help them, I will do it. If not, then I won’t. But again, I do that rarely, because I have so many other commitments.

1:33:24 Brian Rose: Right. Let’s talk a bit about heroin. Because I’ve had guests in here, and they see me in my suit and all that stuff, and at the end I tell them I just did a movie called Iron Mind that talked about my heroin overdose, and they’re visibly shocked. So it’s a funny drug that has all sorts of baggage that comes along with it. And when I started talking about my addiction and use, people don’t know how to fit it into who I am now, or even my background or my career. You spent a lot of time in Vancouver with drug addicts and with heroin, and now we see this kind of opioid crisis in America, and these highly concentrated forms like fentanyl, not to mention the pharmaceutical versions before that, the pill versions, that kind of got people, sometimes as a gateway, to the heroin drives. I just wondered if you had some thoughts on opiates, opiate addiction, and people’s reaction to something like this.

1:34:20 Gabor Maté: Well, so in my book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, I look at what the opiates actually do, why they’re so powerful. So they function in an internal brain system that we already have, which is the endorphin system. And endorphins are natural, internally occurring opiates, and they have three major functions in life. And those major functions explain what the heroin does for people. The first function is pain relief. So the opiates provide pain relief. They’re the most powerful pain relievers that we have, not just physically but emotionally as well. So pain relief is very important to people. Secondly, opiates, or endorphins, our internal morphine-like substances, facilitate the experience of pleasure and reward. So without opiate activity, we have no joy, no elation. And thirdly, they facilitate love. They facilitate the attachment relationship between the infant and the mother. So when mother and infant are gazing into each other’s eyes, they both have endorphin release in their brains, and that’s why they fall in love.

1:35:36 So the opiate addict is somebody who’s got too much pain, not enough pleasure and reward in life, and not enough love in their lives. And as a sex trade worker said to me, and I quote her in the book, I asked her what heroin did for her, and she said, “The first time I did heroin, it felt like a warm, soft hug.” And that’s the power of the opiate addiction: it gives you three qualities without which life is unlivable. And if your brain was deprived of the conditions that promote the healthy development of the endorphin circuits, you might be a sitting duck for heroin addiction, because when you get the heroin, you feel normal for the first time in your life.

1:36:18 Brian Rose: And how do you break something like that?

1:36:24 Gabor Maté: Well, that’s the whole thing about addiction: there’s such human motivations, and people just want to feel like normal human beings. Well, how do you break it? Well, again, you get your powerlessness, you get the negative impact, and you get help to find love and pain relief and connection in your life without the use of heroin. So it’s not just a question of stopping the behavior, it’s a question of developing new ways of having those needs met. That’s the treatment, and that happens over time. It takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of love, a lot of support. And unfortunately our treatment system deprives people of those qualities rather than provides them.

1:37:11 Brian Rose: Right. We punish people.

1:37:12 Gabor Maté: We ostracize them, we exclude them, rather than embracing them, rather than giving them what they need. We think that depriving them of what they need is a way to shock them into abstinence. And even if you shock people into abstinence, you still haven’t cured them, you haven’t healed them.

1:37:30 Brian Rose: I think it’s like in Russia, I think that’s kind of a standard way of treating addicts.

1:37:33 Gabor Maté: Oh, yeah. Chain them to the bed in there.

1:37:40 Brian Rose: Yeah. And to shame people, or in China, for that matter. And in America we criminalize them, which repeats the childhood trauma cycle.

1:37:46 Gabor Maté: Well, Bessel van der Kolk, who’s the world-leading trauma expert, said that 95% of the people in the jails of the United States are traumatized children. So actually we’re taking the most vulnerable, the most hurt people, and re-traumatizing them, and we think this is the way to deal with human beings.

1:38:06 Brian Rose: How does it make you feel when you see this setup in America?

1:38:12 Gabor Maté: It’s beyond sad, it’s tragic. And it’s frustrating, because we know better. We have the human experience, we have the science, we have all the evidence we need. We have the more humane practices that have been demonstrated elsewhere. It’s just a society in absolute denial that continues to do this to its members, and it’s reaping the results. In the United States now, every three weeks they have the equivalent of as many deaths as happened in 9/11. They have a 9/11 every three weeks from drug overdoses. And you’d think they’d learn. No, they’re toughening it up again under Trump, making it even worse.

1:38:59 Brian Rose: Right. And no chance of plant medicines being introduced there?

1:39:03 Gabor Maté: Well, with the plant medicines, there’s been some progress. Not plant medicine, but the psychedelics. So the Food and Drug Administration in the States has now acknowledged MDMA, which is ecstasy, to be a breakthrough medication in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.

1:39:23 Brian Rose: Yeah, we had Rick Doblin in here a few months ago.

1:39:25 Gabor Maté: Rick Doblin, yeah. And Michael Pollan.

1:39:26 Brian Rose: Yeah, we had Michael here too. So you know his best-selling book. Are you happy to see that out?

1:39:33 Gabor Maté: I was very happy. Well, I’m misquoted in it, so why should I be happy? Apparently. I haven’t read it yet, but apparently he interviewed me for it. But certainly that book is a breakthrough, because he’s such a mainstream author. He’s a very meticulous researcher, and he’s completely straightforward. He’s not an alternative lifestyle advocate. He writes about serious issues, and he’s very serious and committed and very educated, and he carries a lot of authority. So his book has opened a lot of minds to these alternative possibilities. And again, I don’t want to put all my eggs into that basket. The plant work that I do, I do one week out of 52, or two weeks. It’s not mostly what I do. I just think it’s a modality that we’re foolish to ignore and foolish not to look at the evidence for.

1:40:26 Brian Rose: Right. Did you get some exhaustion, or some trauma yourself, working in downtown Vancouver? That can’t be easy, to do that year after year.

1:40:34 Gabor Maté: No. Any trauma that I got was from my workaholism, not from my working with those people. Working with those people was always very edifying, actually. They’re interesting, creative, sensitive people, very grateful for whatever support they received. It wasn’t my mission to make them different from who they were. It was my mission to support their own healing, if that’s the path they were on, or to make their lives more livable if that’s not the path they were on. And that was intensely satisfying and meaningful work.

1:41:15 And it was very authentic work, because those people, unlike the rest of society, don’t pretend to be anything other than who they are. You know, they’re cheaters, they’re liars, they’re manipulators, and they say to me, “What am I supposed to do, doc? I’m an addict. This is the only way I can survive.” So they were very authentic about their cheating and their manipulation, as opposed to the rest of society, which also cheats and manipulates under some pretense. They were going to be real about it. So it’s very invigorating to work in that atmosphere. So for me that was never a problem. The problem for me came when I let myself down, and I’d be intensely irritated by them because I was irritated by myself.

1:41:59 Brian Rose: Okay. And what do we do about this opioid epidemic, and the fentanyl and all this stuff?

1:42:10 Gabor Maté: In the context of the present war on drugs, it’s an unsolvable problem. Because in Vancouver right now, you can’t even get heroin anymore. It’s all fentanyl. It’s so cheap, and it’s manufactured locally. And so the margin of safety, which is the margin between the dose that gets you high and the dose that kills you, is very small. And when you test people now in the injection sites, mostly it’s fentanyl that they’re using.

1:42:39 What would have to happen is, first of all, we’d have to decriminalize the personal possession of drugs, so people don’t have to go to illegal dealers. Number one. Number two, you have to have clinics where confirmed opioid addicts are given pure heroin in safe quantities, so they can inject and stay alive. This has been done with success here in Britain at some clinics, and in Switzerland and elsewhere. We know the value of it. We’d have to decriminalize, which would immediately put a lot of the illegal dealers out of business. We’d have to provide those people that need it with what they can use. We have to give them methadone, Suboxone. These are opiate substitutes that people can legally ingest. Those for whom methadone and Suboxone are not sufficient, we have to give them heroin, and we have to give it to them in safe quantities and in safe environments.

1:43:44 Then we’d know that people are no longer out there having to scrounge and fight and rob and manipulate and cheat for their drugs. Now we can engage them in healing, because we have their trust, because they know we’re on their side. Now we have to start dealing with that trauma. Now we have to provide skills training, relational training. All the money that’s now going to pay for the punitive measures needs to go into preventive and healing measures. We have to train people, medical personnel, counselors, in trauma. None of this would cost more money than we’re spending now. It would just be a reallocation of resources in a healthful direction. In other words, we’d have to have a radical change. Under the present system, there’s no solution, just more deaths.

1:44:38 Brian Rose: And this is never going to change under the current leadership of America. This is going to have to be someone else.

1:44:41 Gabor Maté: The current leadership of America, and unfortunately in Canada, where I live, where we had the government making some very progressive moves recently. Because of American pressure, our prime minister stated that we’re fully in support of the war on drugs led by Mr. Trump.

1:45:04 Brian Rose: Even though you legalized marijuana.

1:45:05 Gabor Maté: Even though we legalized marijuana. That doesn’t apply to the other harder drugs, which are the addictive ones. And nor are we any closer to that here in Britain. I don’t think the current government is even contemplating being rational about drug policy.

1:45:26 Brian Rose: So what do you do? Keep spreading your message?

1:45:29 Gabor Maté: I just keep talking. And you know, Jesus said it best. He said, “Those who have ears will hear.” And those that don’t have ears won’t. But you know what, I actually believe in human nature, and I believe that humans actually want the truth. As much as I resist the truth, and you resist the truth, because it’s uncomfortable, and when we accept the truth we have to give something up, and nobody wants to give anything up. That’s me, it’s probably you, it’s most of us. But I also think there’s something in our nature that wants the truth. And that’s what Jesus said again: that you will know the truth, and the truth will liberate you. Not that the truth liberates by itself, but that you will know the truth. It’s the knowledge of truth. And I think something in us wants the truth, even if it’s painful.

1:46:17 So this is why I’m so optimistic about spreading my message, because I think I’m speaking the truth as best I understand it, and I think people want that. And those that don’t want it today will want it tomorrow. So I have an optimistic long-term perspective. In the short term, I see nothing but more suffering.

1:46:35 Brian Rose: This adventure where I went down to Costa Rica for the ayahuasca ceremonies is the start of our next film, which makes me question my workaholism a little bit. It’s called Dissolution: Beyond the Human Ego. And this is the first part of us trying to examine ourselves and to look at what’s happening around the world, with this kind of rise of tribalism and our relationship with the ego.

1:47:01 And the environment. You know, there’s a lot of anger out there, and to try to say, is it really our relationship with ourselves? And so the start of it was to try to dissolve that ego with the plant medicines, but we’re also going to try to talk to a lot of other people about how we get in touch with ourselves in different ways, things that we talked about: therapy, or endurance racing, or somatic work, or all these other things. And I was just curious about your thoughts on this issue, when you see what we’re doing to the environment or what we’re doing to each other. You were just in Turkey and Hungary, and you see this kind of right wing flaring up, and you speak to intellectuals and they’re really feeling it. I just wondered what your thoughts are. Is this a reflection of ourselves, or our relationship with ourselves?

1:47:51 Gabor Maté: Well, first of all, we live in a culture, we live in a society, and that has an impact on us. So it’s not an individual question, it’s a social and political and economic question. And what we have here is a system in deep crisis, where inequality is rising, as you know, where the environment is being degraded, all in the name of profit. So we live in a system that, for the sake of its survival, is willing to destroy the very grounds for survival. That’s just the reality of it. Which on the social level manifests as the ego run rampant, because ego just wants to aggrandize itself, and that’s what we’re seeing. So your film’s addressing the core issue right now.

1:48:47 And that’s what my next book, again, The Myth of Normal: Health and Illness in an Insane Culture, is about. I’m saying this culture’s gone insane, and so that’s both an individual question but also a social question. And I’ll be spending the next couple of years writing that book. So in a way the inquiry is very similar to what you’re engaged in in this film.

1:49:11 Brian Rose: And it’s kind of magnified by this whole blanket now surrounding the world, of the internet and social media, where things can really get magnified very quickly.

1:49:22 Gabor Maté: Oh yeah, everything is magnified. Everybody now, it doesn’t matter how retrograde or destructive their message, has a megaphone and can reach a lot of people. And there’s no sense of responsibility, because you can say whatever you want. Well, this is the challenge. So I’m not going to see this as a doomsday scenario, but I’m saying this is the world that we’re living in. So this is the world in which there’s even more need for self-examination, for authenticity, for truth-seeking, for painful inquiry into our own functioning and into the social functioning. So in a sense, the worse it gets, the more it induces people to ask the right questions.

1:50:13 Brian Rose: How much time do you think we have left?

1:50:16 Gabor Maté: I don’t… I’m late for dinner.

1:50:18 Brian Rose: I want to get you out of here so you can see your wife.

1:50:21 Gabor Maté: My wife’s not here, but it’s somebody else I’m going to dinner with.

1:50:25 Brian Rose: Okay, we’ll get you there. But I also mean on this earth: how much time do we have left?

1:50:29 Gabor Maté: Oh, you’re being philosophical? Are you being practical?

1:50:32 Brian Rose: How much time do human beings have? Do you think there’s a period of time where, if we don’t really stop going insane, we’re going to get to a point of no return?

1:50:44 Gabor Maté: It’s a potential. I mean, if I believe the scientists, which I do, that is the case. There was a recent report within the last couple of weeks saying that the climate change and the temperature rise is happening much faster than anticipated, and so there’s some kind of an endpoint. Now, I still have faith that humanity will wake up. Karl Marx said once that humanity sets itself only those challenges it can actually meet. I hope he was right.

1:51:15 Brian Rose: What was that quote again?

1:51:16 Gabor Maté: Humanity will only set itself challenges that it can actually meet. It will only pose problems for which it can find a solution. I hope that’s the case. There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary, but I still maintain that we have the capacity within ourselves to turn it around. But the timeline is certainly shortening, and I’m not in a position to prognosticate. I’m only telling you I still maintain a degree of optimism about it.

1:51:40 Brian Rose: Okay. Let’s finish with the last couple of questions I usually ask. I asked you this last time, I’m going to ask you again, because it might have a different answer. You know, you’re no spring chicken.

1:51:57 Gabor Maté: Thank you for calling to tell me that.

1:52:01 Brian Rose: How does it feel? Do you ever feel old, or do you feel young, or do you feel like you have lots of time left?

1:52:07 Gabor Maté: I have no idea how much time I have left.

1:52:10 Brian Rose: Me neither.

1:52:11 Gabor Maté: You know, within the last half-year, two people, particularly one close friend of mine, died. I live as healthy a lifestyle as I can. I do the emotional work, I do the yoga, I take care of myself physically. I exercise every day, I eat healthy, I do what I can. But I have no idea how much time I have left. All I know is, and one of the reasons that I welcomed my wife’s insistence last year, is because at age 73, as I was last year, I truly asked myself, how do I want to live the rest of my life? Do I want to live depleted, alienated, at odds with the person I love the most? Or do I want to live in peace, and with a sense of purpose and satisfaction and harmony in my relationship?

1:53:08 And that’s a moment-to-moment question. I have no idea how much time I have left, nobody can say. But I don’t want to look back and say that at this late stage in my life, I’m still making the trauma-based decisions that have driven so much of my previous existence. I don’t want to say that when I look back. And at the present moment, I’m saying I’m not doing that, and I’m feeling very satisfied, and I’m happy as a result of it.

1:53:39 Brian Rose: What could you have told the 20-year-old Gabor?

1:53:44 Gabor Maté: Well, you asked me that last time. I could have told myself anything, but I wouldn’t have listened. Because when I look back, people did try to tell me, but I didn’t listen. And when you look back on your life, weren’t there people that tried to tell you?

1:54:02 Brian Rose: Yeah. Also the doctor that gave me the Narcan to wake me out of my overdose. They were trying to tell me something. No, I didn’t listen.

1:54:11 Gabor Maté: Yeah. And you said in the film that you overdosed, and the next thing you woke up in hospital, and you realized that your parents could be getting a telegram right now, that their son Brian, the Wall Street stockbroker, has just died of an overdose. But as you said in the film, that didn’t wake you up.

1:54:31 Brian Rose: No. Kept using.

1:54:36 Gabor Maté: So it doesn’t matter what I would have told myself. I wouldn’t have listened.

1:54:37 Brian Rose: What was 20-year-old Gabor like?

1:54:42 Gabor Maté: Very intense, very committed to social justice, but very unaware of his own drives and motivations. He was intelligent, a good sense of humor, very egotistical, very much wanting the attention on himself, needing that attention. Intellectually very courageous. I was quite capable of finding a truth and being really willing to maintain it, it doesn’t matter what family or friends thought about it. Not out of stubbornness, just because if something was true, something was true, and it was bigger than me. Very active, very hard to be around sometimes, very argumentative.

1:55:33 Brian Rose: ADHD.

1:55:41 Gabor Maté: ADHD, of course. I would say also I could be fun to be with at the same time. I could be very interesting to be with. I was all those things.

1:55:53 Brian Rose: Final question. To the 20-year-old that’s watching this now, based on everything we talked about today, what’s your advice to them, growing up in this crazy world, with the digital devices and the divisive politics? What advice do you give to them? What should they be thinking about?

1:56:39 Gabor, I know you have a lot of raving fans from around the world, but I put myself right up there as one of them. So I deeply appreciate you for everything you do. I get teared up here. Thank you for being you, thank you for coming on the previous episode, that means a lot to me, and thanks for being in our movie Iron Mind, and thank you for all the great things you said about it. You know, it could have been our interview that started that whole process. I very much appreciate it.

1:57:10 Gabor Maté: Well, I’m also very much meaning it when I tell you what a pleasure it is to speak with you. It’s such a great thing to get a platform where I can just sort of speak whatever is on my mind, and to have it immediately understood and mirrored back to me. And it’s a great thing that you’re doing as well. You’re reaching so many people.

1:57:32 Brian Rose: Well, yeah, we are, for sure. And there’s so many things you talk about, so many books you’ve written. We talked about eight or ten different things tonight, and I know there’s even more. So I’d love you back in June.

1:57:48 Gabor Maté: Okay, well, you want to bet? I’m speaking in London in June.

1:57:49 Brian Rose: Okay, good. Well, let’s have you back on.

1:57:54 Gabor Maté: Two new books coming out. This book is now in the UK, and at least three other books are coming out in January here in the UK. And then I’m working on two new books.

1:58:07 Brian Rose: Two new books. But no, we’re watching the workaholic alert.

1:58:12 Gabor Maté: Absolutely.

1:58:13 Brian Rose: That’s good. Fantastic. Again, thank you so much for being here, and so glad we made it. I consider you a good friend of mine, so to be continued in our relationship. And again, if anybody wants to watch the movie Iron Mind, it’s on our website, londonreal.tv/ironmind. I’m going to start listening to one of your books tonight on Audible. If they want to find your books, your website, what’s the best place?

1:58:34 Gabor Maté: drgabormate.com, and Amazon. Amazon is the best place, or the bookstores here in Britain now will have my books, as they do in North America. But I don’t sell books directly. On my website you can find information about the books, and some of the chapters are there to be read for free if people want to sample the books. But I don’t sell the books directly.

1:58:54 Brian Rose: Right. And you do have a lot of events in different parts of the world as well.

1:58:58 Gabor Maté: I have live events and I speak internationally. I’m heading from here to Norway, and all that is on my website. My speaking engagements are always listed on my website. I spoke here in London last night.

1:59:10 Brian Rose: That looks nice. All right, good. And maybe next year we’ll be talking about plant ceremonies. We’ll see. Okay. Gabor, always a huge honor. As we say at London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well in yours.

1:59:18 Gabor Maté: Be well, take care. I’ll see you next year. Thank you.

1:59:22 Brian Rose: Thank you, sir.

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