(gentle music)
Our earliest experiences being in the womb
form the template of who we believe we are,
about how we see other people,
and our place in the world.
When I see human faces, I see beauty,
I see tremendous suffering
and enormous potential for transcendence.
A Greek playwright wrote that the Gods created us
human beings so that we have to suffer into truth.
Our job as human beings is to learn
from our suffering and to grow from it.
We don't have to keep perpetuating pain for ourselves
and inflicting suffering onto others.
In working with so many other people,
I've learned that working
through trauma can teach us so much wisdom
and can reveal the beauty of our existence,
that because of trauma, you had lost sight of.
(gentle music)
(rain pattering)
My name is Gabor Maté and I'm a retired medical doctor
and these days I travel the world speaking
and teaching about child development, health,
illness, stress and trauma.
And speaking about trauma is really part
of the zeitgeist these days.
And I'm very passionate about it for a simple reason:
because in 30 years or more of medical practice
and of addiction medicine,
what I found was that the common template
for virtually all afflictions, mental illness,
physical disease is in fact trauma.
And there's a wisdom in trauma
when we realize that our traumatic responses and imprints
are not ourselves and that we can work them through
and thus become ourselves.
(gentle music)
(people chattering)
Virtually every week there's a study
that more and more people are needing
or seeking help for mental health issues.
More and more youth are diagnosed with anxiety,
many more kids are diagnosed with the whole plethora
of childhood conditions, such as ADHD,
(Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder).
Depression is rising, youth suicide is rising,
addictions are rising.
Genuinely, it's an epidemic.
20% of youth or more are now diagnosable with anxiety
according to all the recent studies.
That's one-fifth.
And those are all only people
who are sufficiently anxious to be diagnosed.
We're talking about an epidemic.
- When you grew up in a circumstance like I grew up,
you're waiting for somebody to scream at you,
you're waiting for something to be thrown,
you don't know if you're going to eat,
you don't know if you're going to be evicted.
So you're constantly anxious and stressed.
I used to think this was a rarity
but when I talked to people,
a huge number of people have these traumatic experiences
as a child that carry, they carry with them.
It's like a monkey on your back.
(disembodied whispering) (soft music)
- Trauma is an overwhelming threat
that you don't how to deal with.
So trauma is not the bad things that happen to you,
but what happens inside you
as a result of what happens to you.
(police radio chatter) (sirens wailing)
- My father was shot and killed on December 25th, 1999.
They found his body in someone's front yard.
So essentially I didn't have anybody to raise me.
So I was raised in the juvenile court system.
I've lived on the streets
since I was 10-years-old by myself.
The law didn't scare me.
I mean, they could have locked me up,
I mean what's the difference?
Nobody out here is gonna miss me.
- My mother, alcoholic. Bad alcoholic.
My father, sex addiction.
His sex addiction ruined our whole family.
Cheating. Caused divorce.
(man and woman shouting)
I started heroin at 26.
That's what really destroyed me.
It just takes the pain away.
I tried building my dream so many times.
I don't really have a dream no more.
- So trauma fundamentally means a disconnection from self.
Why do we get disconnected?
Because it's too painful to be ourselves.
That then becomes a lifelong dynamic.
I no longer know how to deal with emotions.
It means that in relationships when I feel a bit hurt,
I immediately withdraw so I don't have to feel
those emotions that I don't know what to do with.
So there's a disconnect.
It also means that when I have a gut feelings,
I don't follow them.
So I create situations of risk for myself.
The trauma also affects how our brains develop.
Certain key brain circuits that have to do with
how we react and respond and regulate ourselves,
how we handle stress, how we interact with other people,
how much empathy and insight we have,
how much compassionate we have.
These functions of the mid-frontal cortex
are limited and constricted by trauma
because we now know that the brain develops
in interaction with the environment.
So the brains of traumatized children
don't look like the brains of non-traumatized children.
- [Boy] You can take it, please.
- [Man] I've had enough of your crap.
You're gonna start acting like a young man
instead of a toddler.
- [Woman] As a matter of fact,
her ass is on punishment right now
and she ain't even gonna go the fuck back outside.
- [Teenager] What the fuck are you doing?
Dad, I swear to god.
- [Boy] No, no, wait.
- [Man] There's no other way for
you to learn this. - Dad.
Please, stop.
(gentle music)
- During your first 18 years of life,
if a parent or other adult in the household
often or very often would swear at you,
insult you, put you down or humiliate you,
step inside the circle.
(inmates chattering)
If a parent or other adult in the household
often pushed, grabbed, slapped
or threw something at you, step inside the circle.
If a parent or other adult in the household
often or very often ever hit you so hard
that you had marks or were injured, step inside the circle.
If you often felt that no one in your family loved you,
step inside the circle.
Step inside the circle.
(tense music)
I think society got prison wrong
and they're seeing what's wrong with people
instead of what happened to people.
Our mission at Compassion Prison Project
is to transform communities and prisons
with compassionate action.
An adverse childhood experience is a terrible event
that continues to happen to a child.
And there's no way to know when it's gonna happen again,
which puts the kid into a hypervigilant state.
I have eight of those aces, and when I found out
I have eight adverse childhood experiences
and that my behavior was a direct result
of the trauma that I experienced in childhood,
it changed my life.
Men and women in prison, 64% of them
have six or more of those.
(wind blowing)
(car engine roaring)
(birds chirping)
(laughing)
(foot step approaching)
- Hi. Gabor.
- Monique. - Monique?
Hi, Gabor.
(laughing)
I feel like I'm in a throne.
I wanna talk to you guys about why
you think you got addicted,
about what may have happened to you as a child,
the way you saw yourself as being deficient, somehow.
- I was kidnapped at 16 and sold off.
So that's a trauma and that's just something that's
in my life that you can't turn around, right?
- [Gabor] Kidnapped by whom?
- It was a taxi driver who took me and a girlfriend
when we were 16. - Okay.
- [Alicia] And held us for six months in a motel
and sold off my virginity.
(tense music)
car engine roaring)
- [Gabor] And the police was looking
for you all that time, and...
- Well, my mom just thought that I had run away from home,
so she didn't look for me. - She didn't look for you?
- [Alicia] No.
- I really need your permission to
continue or not to continue. - It's okay.
I give my permission.
- The taxi driver knew exactly who to kidnap.
(car engine roaring)
The predator can always tell who is without proection.
Anybody hit you as a child?
- [Alicia] Yes, my father.
He would spank us and take a belt to us.
- Do you remember how that felt to you?
- Like I just remember the pain of it,
instead of thinking, oh, why?
Why did I deserve this?
I just remember the pain and the...
- [Gabor] And how long did that go on for?
- Well until I was approximately 16
and started fighting back.
- So, 10 or 11 years? - Yeah.
- Okay.
Let's say you're the mother of the five-year-old
and this five-year-old is being hit with a belt,
and she's in pain.
She doesn't understand, you know,
she's just, it just hurts.
And it hurts emotionally
because this man who is supposed to love me is beating me.
So when you're being hit like that,
there's only two possibilities.
My father is a bad person or hates me
or I'm a bad person.
So the only protection is to believe that,
oh, I'm not lovable.
Let's say you're the mother of the five-year-old.
Who would you want that five-year-old to talk to?
- [Alicia] Myself.
- Okay. Who did you talk to?
- Nobody.
- That's the trauma.
In other words, by the time you were five-years-old,
you were completely alone. (child sobbing)
What I'm suggesting really, Alicia,
is that your mother was traumatized, too.
Do you know anything about her childhood?
- Well, she was abused as a child as well
from an alcoholic father.
- See, she learned in her childhood
not to pay attention to her feelings.
That's the only way she could survive.
- [Alicia] Yeah.
- So the reason she didn't know it
was not because she didn't love you,
but because she herself was shut down inside.
And that's what I'm saying,
it's multi-generational
- Mm-hm. - Okay?
- It sucks. - Yeah.
You can't pick out who's at fault here.
It didn't begin with anybody.
It goes on and on and on from one generation to the next.
(gentle music)
- We were talking about the effects of slavery
on our behavior, and I'll be honest with you,
I ain't agree with it when I first heard it.
But then when he talked about the discipline
I had a flashback of how I used to get whipped
with a bullwhip.
Naked.
I hadn't put the two and two together,
but I realized, that's how slaves were whipped,
because it was generational trauma
passed on from one mother to another mother
to another mother and then passed on to me.
I still got marks on my legs and stuff behind that.
And I just remembered there was no one I could run to.
No one that would help me.
And she just was telling me how much she loved me
as she cried and she beat me with a bullwhip.
(soft, tense music) (soft vocalizing)
(soft music)
- [Woman] He's the best-selling author of four books
published in 12 languages sold on five continents.
Please welcome Dr. Gabor Maté.
(applause) (cheering)
- I actually wrote my speech out tonight,
which I don't usually do but maybe of nervousness
in front of this group of strong women.
(audience laughing)
The truth is that guys are afraid of women.
(audience laughing)
I don't know if you realize that, but that's,
a lot of the stuff that we do is totally out of fear.
Well,
When you felt bad as a kid, who did you speak to?
When the pain is there and there's no one to share it with,
and the child's got very limited resources,
to deal with that, and what they do
is they disconnect from themselves.
When you disconnect from yourself,
you no longer have yourself.
You've lost yourself.
When we talk about trauma,
we usually think of something terrible happening to a person
but that's not the only trauma there is.
As the other kind of trauma may not
have to do with terrible things happening to you.
- Most people look at my childhood
and they're like: damn, you had an awesome
childhood, and because I had everything.
I come from upper, upper middle class, you know, in Idaho,
and I got everything given to me,
but that was their way of parenting.
They'd give me everything.
So I'd shut up and wouldn't bug them.
They were too busy, they were always working.
- So children don't get traumatized because they get hurt.
Children get traumatized because
they're alone with the hurt.
- I'm a lifer inmate.
I'm here on a first degree murder.
I committed my crime when I was 20-years-old.
And I asked myself what events in my life
brought me to the point where I could think
that it's okay to take a human life?
And it had to deal with a lot of
adverse childhood experiences.
My main one as to why I started going downhill
was being abandoned by my father.
I looked up to him.
I wanted to be just like my dad.
He was my hero.
When I turned eight or nine-years-old,
he got deported to Mexico, and that devastated me.
As a kid, my mom used to tell me,
Mi hijo, pray to God that he will come back,
but he never came.
- A baby that you don't pick up will actually die.
Even if you feed them and you change them
and look after them,
because they get overwhelmed by their feelings
and they get over stressed.
And so the baby needs the mother's and the father's brain
to regulate her own brain, to regulate her emotions.
It's not just that you're overwhelmed.
It's also there's nobody there to hold you.
(baby crying)
There's a huge school of thought in North America
that teaches mothers to help their babies sleep
by ignoring their crying.
Nevermind the mother's milk,
the infant just wants to attach,
because the only way the infant can attach is physically.
When he's not being held, he's not being attached to them.
When that's done night after night after night,
that's traumatic. And we're still telling
mothers to do that.
If you actually look at genuine human needs,
if you connect the gut and the heart and the soul,
then there's nothing more normal
than a child sleeping in the arms of a parent.
So I've often thought about the sources of my own issues.
An infant two months of age in Hungary,
when the Germans, the Nazis, marched into the country
and they began to exterminate the Jewish population.
So that was my first year of life,
with a terrorized mother, grandparents killed in Auschwitz,
a father away in forced labor,
antisemitism, the ever nearing shadow of annihilation,
and ultimately a separation from my mother.
I was a little short of one-year-old
when my mother had to hand me to a stranger
in the ghetto of Budapest
and send me away to some relatives in hiding,
so we didn't see each other for six weeks,
and she didn't know if she would live or not.
In her diary she said: "this was
the hardest six weeks of her life."
That was the experience of the first
nearly year and a half of my life.
And sometimes I thought, well, gee,
I must have received a lot of love at the same time
otherwise I'd be a lot more crazy than I actually am.
For trauma to happen,
you don't need second World War and you don't need racism,
you don't need genocide,
and you don't need the privations of war.
You just need parents who are so alienated
from their own gut feelings that they will let
their infants cry without picking them up
and that child is desperate for a relationship.
That's all it takes.
(footsteps approaching)
- Well, hi. - Hi Alison.
- Welcome. - Hi, Gabor.
- [Alison] Welcome, Gabor.
- Wow.
What a view.
- Thank you.
For me being a drug addict, the deep down need to escape,
I think it's almost into a more realistic place
than the insanity that we see, the chaos we see around us.
I just wanted that place all the time.
I can really talk for the 37 years I've been recovered
and have had slips in the program, quote, AA.
- [Gabor] And what's the fear?
- Well, the fear is I'll be abandoned.
It's back with the homo sapiens,
I'll be thrown out of the cave.
- What is your fear of being abandoned?
- Well naturally that I'll die
unless I do all of the stuff for other people.
- [Gabor] When you do all the stuff for the people,
- [Alison] Mm-hm.
- [Gabor] what are you doing to yourself?
- I'm abandoning me. - Yeah.
- Okay.
- Yeah. - So you're actually enacting
your worst fear. - Mm-hm.
I was the youngest of five, very ambitious family,
very successful, except everyone's an alcoholic.
I go in the bar, they're drinking.
(people chattering)
There's no room for me.
It's like, oh, shut up Alison, shut up.
You're wrong. You're wrong.
So my job was to be wrong in the family.
I'll never forget my mother saying to me:
"I just don't understand you!"
And I was six-years-old and I thought,
my god, if you don't understand me, I'm lost.
- Allow me to give you another perception of you.
You're the one that more than others
absorbs all the pain and stress in the family.
And then you manifest it and they can't stand seeing it.
So in exiling you, they're exiling
their own pain and stress. - Right, right.
- As a child, we have two fundamental needs.
One need that's with us since infancy,
and it's absolute and it's not negotiable is attachment.
And so the other need then is authenticity.
Authenticity, therefore, is the connection to ourselves,
because without authenticity,
without a connection to our gut feelings,
just how long do you survive out there in nature?
So authenticity is not some new age,
pseudo-spiritual concept.
It's actually a survival necessity.
(balloons popping)
(tense music)
What happens if in order to survive
or to adjust to your environment,
you have to suppress your gut feelings,
you have to suppress your authenticity?
(mirror shatters)
So normal society does not allow anger,
and the child who's angry must be separated.
In other words, we have to threaten
his attachment to relationships, on which is life depends
so that he can suppress his emotions.
Well that child, if he learns the lesson well,
will disconnect from their anger,
and then he's a sitting duck for depression,
mental illness or for physical illness.
Okay, so kid is angry, but how about helping him
move through the anger to learn how to modulate it?
Not to repress it, but to learn to become friends with it.
We don't want people that are not angry.
We want people to know that anger
doesn't have to be destructive.
What were you pushing down when you were depressed?
- Anger. - Right.
You were pushing down- - Rage.
- You were pushing down your anger, right?
- [Alison] Yeah.
- [Gabor] Can you see how why for a six-year-old
it might be a really brilliant idea to push down the rage?
- Yeah.
- Why?
- For survival.
- Exactly.
You talked about your many failures.
I just want you to pick one.
- The fear if left on my own, I won't get out of bed.
I've done that before.
- [Gabor] And you regard that as a failure?
- [Alison] Falling apart I regard that as a failure.
- [Gabor] You regard that as a failure?
- [Alison] Right.
- Okay.
So your failure is that you got depressed
and as you put it, you fell apart.
Is that the failure?
- [Alison] Yeah.
- [Gabor] Just identify the age that you
first recall being depressed then.
- Probably about six or seven.
- [Gabor] How old are your kids now?
My oldest daughter is 33,
my son is 30 and my youngest daughter's 27.
- [Gabor] Okay.
Choose one as a thought experiment right now,
and I want you to imagine them at age seven.
- Mm-hm.
- Let's say they get depressed.
Would you go to them and say: "You are total failure?"
- [Alison] Of course not.
- Why not?
Notice you're calling yourself a failure?
I'm going to say something radical to you.
- Okay.
- The depression was a major success,
not a failure.
Okay? Now I know that sounds ridiculous, but-
- No, no. I'm listening.
You're telling me that having that pain
showed me deeper inside of myself,
how I was abandoning myself. - Precisely.
So maybe you want to stop calling it a failure.
- [Alison] Mm-hm.
- [Gabor] You go through your whole life like that
and see how everything that you judge about yourself
actually served the purpose at the time.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hm.
- Really, isn't it simple? - It is simple.
- Gabor Maté, thanks very much for coming on Under the Skin.
The reason I'm so excited to talk to you,
the reason that I believe you're having such
an important cultural impact is because of your
rare compassion and insight into the world of addiction.
When it was heroin, I would like have,
I would reflect. Well, after I'd used and just go, right,
this isn't for me, this has got to stop.
This is not a sustainable system.
- You think you'd never need it anymore
'cause you feel complete. - Mm.
- And then comes the remorse of what have I done?
And then you say I don't need to do to this ever again.
(Russell laughs)
And then by the time I'm home,
I'm running back to the store again
to get the next thing that I didn't buy.
In the life of every person who's ever been addicted
and ever will be addicted, there's always trauma.
An addiction is any behavior
that a person finds relief in the short term
and craves but suffers negative consequences
and cannot give it up.
There are so many addictions.
Could be drugs, obviously, alcohol, nicotine.
Could also be sex, could be gambling,
could be shopping, could be eating,
could be pornography, could be the internet,
could be gaming, could be work, could be relationships.
That's what an addiction is.
First issue is not why the addiction
but why the pain?
(woman sobbing)
(melancholy music)
(water splashing)
In our society there are two myths around addiction.
The pernicious line is the belief
that addiction is a choice and that the decisions
that arise out of addictions
are therefore a matter of individual culpability.
And so therefore addicts for the most part
are punished for being addicted.
Now the other belief around addiction,
but still misleading, is that it's an inherited disease,
it's a biological disorder of the brain.
That belief is more humane,
much more than the choice belief,
because at least if somebody inherits a disease,
they're not to be punished for it
but they are to be provided
with treatment as with any disease.
However, it's also misleading because it ignores
why people really get addicted,
which has got nothing to do with disease.
It's among the normal human responses to trauma.
When people are suffering,
they want to escape their suffering.
That's normal.
(soft music)
- My name is Tuta Ponchiao Chi.
I'm 43-years-old.
I come from a family of Thai restaurant owners.
I moved away when I was 14.
I was never good enough.
I mean, I think if I had parents who didn't really care
and was lenient, no, I don't think I would have
really got right into it and really got addicted.
I might've just, you know, tried it once or twice,
but I think the pressure was on from the upbringing
and having to feel like I had to achieve
and be the best of what I did, an A student.
And so when I moved away, I really wanted to prove
not just myself but to them that I was
more than what they saw.
You know, I did apply to Stanford University.
That was my number one choice.
I was disappointed I didn't get in.
And San Francisco State University was my second choice
and while there I did do the same things
that I was doing when I was in high school,
playing for the NCWA, singing choir.
With doing so many things, pledging sororities
and doing, being different club members,
I'm saying I was just trying to find my way in the world.
And then I started to work at the nightclubs here.
And so I think that's when I really evolved
because I wanted to do everything.
I wanted to go to school,
I wanted to work, but I needed to do homework as well.
So the pressure was on then.
So then it got into heavier drugs,
so I needed the meth to stay up.
- I think our society just doesn't understand addiction.
Without the addiction, they felt incomplete,
they felt this huge emptiness inside.
It's as if the addiction was to complete themselves,
and to somehow temporarily cover up the emptiness.
Why the finger-pointing, why the judgments
on a particular group of people who are addicted
who happen to use substances?
My first job that I ever had as a physician in Vancouver
after I did my internship was actually
in the downtown east side of Vancouver.
It's North America's most concentrated
and most dramatic area of drug use
where there's more people injecting
and ingesting and inhaling all kinds of substances
than anywhere else in the planet.
And I go this old, broken down hotel
with cracking paint on the walls
and there's strange people walking in and out,
and I felt totally at home right away.
And after two years, I shifted my full-time work
to the downtown east side.
So I worked there for 12 years.
They all had suffered tremendous torment as children,
which also meant that their addictions were extreme.
They were quite willing to sacrifice love, life,
relationship, health just for the next hit.
They were that desperate to escape from reality
because reality had been so cruel to them.
We were dealing with people with severe infections.
They would inject drugs.
That would give them abscesses,
not only in their skin or their muscles,
but also in their brains,
in their spinal cord, in their joints.
So they have to be hospitalized,
which is the only facility where you can deliver
IV antibiotics several times a day.
But they were users, so there'd be
always absconding from the hospital
and even using the IV lines to inject through.
So inevitably they would be kicked out of hospital,
which means that their life-threatening infections
would be untreated.
This is how I met Joey Carter.
I think I pushed him across an intersection once
in his wheelchair, maybe that's the first time
we actually met.
- And you helped me out and you said, what are you doing?
Enough's enough.
I'm going to admit you to CTC-R, are you going to go there?
And I was like, well, what about my addiction?
And then you said, well, what are you using?
And I said, well, I've been using morphine and m-eslon.
I said, how many will you give me a day?
You said as many as you have in your pocket.
- By meeting people where they're at
and treating them like human beings
and not trying to change them
actually opens up the possibility
of transformation for them.
And Joey's a plain example.
- 'Cause they had come in like every four hours
to give me my morphine. - Yeah.
- And I wasn't needing it.
I was saving it, right.
And I woke up and there is like morphine all over the bed
and I thought it was in heaven.
(laughing)
- I do recall your poetry,
and you were a very, a very avid writer.
- Yeah.
- And you've shared some of that with me.
Is there one that, you know, that you can recite now?
- Yeah.
It goes (clears throat)
I misbehave when I crave to push the venom in my veins.
I lose all control of my inner soul
and my demons hold the reins.
I deceive whoever believes, I twist their open trust.
With nefarious precision and tunnel vision,
I pursue the venom with lust.
With the desire so strong,
I forget all bonds hurting the ones I adore,
And even though they love me, they move on from me
to let me fight my war.
Uncontrollable, I'm inconsolable,
slowly I'm dying inside.
A glutton of such, I've used too much,
now there's no life in my eyes.
- Wow.
(soft piano music)
I wanna talk to you guys
about why you think you got addicted?
Like, what did it do for you in the short term
that you wanted it, like you appreciated it?
- The one thing that I've learned
was gratification through sex.
It would pay my rent, it would pay my food,
it would pay my clothes.
But it was also feeling loved.
- [Gabor] Feeling loved? Like...
- Having that desire for somebody to care and-
- And want you. - Want you.
- I wouldn't be able to have a sexual relationship
if I wasn't using, because I couldn't feel anything
towards the other person.
- It made you feel more alive?
- Yeah. It made me feel more in tune.
- Yeah. - Yeah, like that's...
And I used it to have feelings.
- I didn't feel pretty,
I didn't feel like...
And as soon as I would do a little bit of drugs,
my self-esteem would instantly go up.
- I did so much sports and was on such a strict schedule
that when I started to use in like grade eight,
grade nine, like, I was free.
- So freedom.
Sense of aliveness.
Completion. Self-esteem.
These are all wonderful things, aren't they?
When they talk about addiction being a bad choice,
I say no, it isn't.
It's actually a solution to a problem.
If we understand that the addiction
is not the primary problem,
but really a response to trauma,
then it becomes obvious that in order to heal addiction,
you have to heal the trauma.
But it means that you see the wound
that's driving that person.
(birds chirping)
(melancholy music)
Underneath that traumatized persona,
there's the healthy individual who has never
found expression in this life
because they were never given
the venue for expression, never given the relationships,
in which they could, their all
authentic humanity could be expressed.
(soft music)
Are we free? Are we conscious?
Are we making a decision based on full awareness
or are we driven by unconscious dynamics
that we've inherited or that we developed
as a response to childhood trauma?
Well, insofar as we're not conscious, we are not free.
We have then a social structure that induces trauma
in a lot of people,
therefore it induces escapist,
addictive behaviors in a lot of people,
and those inner trends line up
with how society looks like on the outside.
So therefore all this looks perfectly normal
and perfectly natural.
Fundamentally the messages is that with our minds
we create the world.
So if I have a worldview that the world is a horrible place,
then I'm going to live in a world where
I have to be aggressive, suspicious, competitive
and make myself as big as possible
so I don't get eaten up.
So I have to be grandiose and cunning
because that's the world I'm living in.
And these are the people that our society
rewards with power. (dramatic music)
- Do you think that the inability of these individuals
to manifest real change is a demonstration
that what we have are deeply entrenched
and traumatized systems that are predicated
on unconscious choices, unconscious drives
and that the system cannot and will not
alter itself from within itself, but will sustain itself,
and it's only sort of new, radical ideas that can alter it?
- That's exactly what I'm saying.
Large segments of the economy survive
because people buy things that give them temporary pleasure
but do them no good whatsoever in the long-term,
in fact are even harmful.
I mean, we're going so far as to destroy the earth
because of our addiction.
(tense music)
The disconnect from the body of the earth
really has to do with the disconnect from our own bodies.
The two are together.
And the exploitation of the earth
as if it was something separate from us
has a lot to do with patriarchal domination.
I mean, we talk about mother earth.
Look what we're doing to mother.
It's a mother hatred almost.
It speaks to a blindness and a passivity
which itself is a marker of societal and collective trauma.
Our schools are full of kids with learning difficulties,
mental health issues that are trauma-based,
but the average teacher never gets
a single lecture on trauma.
They're fundamentally working with
an essential lack of information.
I actually barely mentioned the criminal justice system
has no understanding or even acquaintance
with the concept of trauma.
In fact, they often create policies
that further deepen people's trauma.
That these institutions need to be informed
of what trauma is and how to respond to it.
- I went between custodies of different
states and counties...
Since 18.
I struggled with addiction and they were sending me
to these places to get the help that you needed.
I had nothing but the authorities telling me
that it was my fault, my fault, my fault,
because you're choosing this, you know
and I can't keep choosing it.
And you're supposed to trust and believe in these people.
California industrialized prison.
- Trauma doesn't know of color,
trauma doesn't know of age,
trauma doesn't know a tax bracket,
trauma doesn't know any of these things.
Anybody can be traumatizing anybody.
Symptoms of trauma:
nightmares and night terrors.
- [Man 1] Inability to love.
- Addictive behavior.
- [Man 2] Insomnia.
- Depression.
- Shame.
- That's not who you are,
but it's a symptom of being traumatized,
and we're here to heal each other.
We heal in community.
When I do these circles with anybody,
when they see the extent of childhood trauma in themselves,
but also in the people around them, it's a shift.
It takes the othering out. It actually brings a human in.
And that, as a society, is one of the imperatives
that we need to get to.
We gotta start seeing each other
for what happened to us and not what's wrong with us.
(cars honking)
(upbeat, bright music)
(soft music)
- My name is Romie Nottage.
I am the senior director of San Francisco
and social innovation for Downtown Streets Team,
and that is changing the lives of people
who are currently homeless through the dignity of work.
Labeling people as just drug addicts,
like, it's deeper than that.
They probably at a younger age have been reinforced
that their value is not as significant as others.
The pain is the root cause of people
trying to feel comfortable in this world.
Using street drugs is a method.
It is a behavior to support something that is uncomfortable.
- I was homeless for about 15 years.
It is a survival of the fittest.
I had three kids on the street while homeless,
walking around, no shoes, selling drugs, doing drugs,
hoping they would miscarry.
All the babies came out with everything.
Meth, crystal, cocaine, everything you could think of.
I did utilize those three moments in time
where I had those babies to just rest up
in a nice place and eat a hot meal.
Just basically took a shower those three times,
'cause while I was homeless, most of us don't shower.
Maybe once a year, if that.
But I was lucky I had the same foster mom, all three boys.
Albert, Jetson and James are all thriving.
They're very healthy.
I did fight for them. Don't get me wrong.
I did try to fight for them,
but I wasn't ready to give up the drug life.
- It was fall, so it was the rain season.
I just remember that constant worry
about where was I gonna go that night?
Would I find shelter?
'Cause there's no where to go, right?
The people that did love me just said you know what?
We're not going to stand by anymore while you kill yourself.
We can't do it.
It's hurting more.
We're dying a harder death than you are.
And they just scattered from my life.
I was utterly alone.
- I've been in the city on the streets now
for four years.
Went to college on my GI bill.
I was in the army for a total of 11 years,
then I got diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
and I retired.
My PTSD comes from experiences with
trying to beat this monkey on my back, you know?
I've had a beautiful home and vehicles
and wife and kids and thrown it all away for drugs.
- So when you pass by someone homeless on the street,
that is such a painful world to live in,
and a very important thing to do is acknowledge them
and not pretending or literally thinking
that no one's sitting right there.
How are you doing?
Hanging in there?
Had a rough sleep last night?
You stay in the TL? - I do.
- Yeah, cool. How long have you been here?
- I moved here from Atlanta February the 7th.
- The number one thing that people
who are experiencing homelessness suffer from
is feeling looked down on.
It's like people just passing by them,
not acknowledging their experience.
That forms an identity that is internalized.
Their sense of self has been attacked.
Their dignity has been completely reinforced
as non-existent every single day.
Humanization of homelessness is where we need to start
because we're working with people,
we're working with nervous systems,
we are working with deflated and traumatized senses of self.
To be honest, if I lived in that world,
I would want to use, too.
It'd get me out of it.
It'd make me feel not like that for a minute.
(knocks) - Hey, Duane, you home?
It's Tessa. (soft music)
Hey, how are you? - Hi, how are you?
- I'm Tessa.
I'm a harm reduction specialist at Abode Housing Services.
I help people move through the pain of their addiction
and regain dignity.
So, oh my gosh, your place looks amazing.
I took this job because of the harm reduction approach,
where people get housing.
You don't have an agenda.
You must do this or that in order to access housing,
you're worthy of housing because housing should be a right.
When people get housed after they've been outdoors
for seven, 15, 25 years, whatever the number is,
you're alone.
You don't have survival to do,
so this is when I'm starting to see
everybody's pain start surfacing
and people are starting to have, you know,
more challenges and emotional challenges
than they did out on the streets.
Dr. Gabor Maté, when I found his teachings,
and specifically The Realm of the Hungry Ghost
kind of changed my outlook in life.
I'm very dear to this work.
(rain pattering)
- I'm Gabor's wife and I have been for close to 50 years.
I met Gabor in October of 1967
when I was a first year student at UBC.
I saw in the student newspaper that they were
looking for cartoonists and I draw.
I walked into the small room and he's sitting there
reading a book and I said (clears throat):
"My name's Rae.
I'm supposed to draw you.
Would you mind just sitting there?"
This is it.
I did this before I knew who he was,
before I'd had a conversation.
What a mysterious guy.
Dark, you know?
Intense.
He was so interesting to me.
- I've always been a rebel.
I mean, in communist Hungary, in grade six,
my teacher wrote in my report card that:
you should watch it because he incites the other students.
(chuckles)
But so that tendency to resist arbitrariness,
what I'm being told and what the official line is.
So I'm really not one for group-think,
and it really helps me to see through all kinds
of nonsense that people accept without questioning.
On a personal level, I'm also a contradiction.
My longing is really a sense of being excluded
from something, and a sense of impossibility,
and I very easily go there.
I mean, that is my baseline.
- Very early in my meeting with Gabor,
I saw clearly the light that he was
and the dark that he was.
So I saw brilliance and I saw real,
I guess trauma is the word I'd use now,
but I didn't know then.
To me it was dark.
And of course, by then I knew he was,
directly had been in the Holocaust,
but it was going to be my job to heal him,
to bring out that light.
I really believe that the purpose of marriage
is to actually go back to the original trauma,
which comes from the family.
I married a man who was so much like my father.
- My scientific interest as well
has been having to deal with my own trauma
because in my 40s, I was a very successful physician
and I was a national columnist for a Canadian newspaper,
and I was the head of the palliative care department
at a major Canadian hospital,
and I was depressed and alienated, in a difficult marriage,
and my children were scared of me
and I didn't like being alive.
- Well, there's just nothing more frustrating
to be in a situation, to see him out there
doing this amazing work, just the healing and the wisdom
and the support, and then come home
and be completely exhausted, irritable.
And then I get the negativity.
I have to be me, I have to be authentic.
My nervous system is so wired
that if I'm not authentic to myself, I'm sick.
I have a stomach ache.
I can't sleep.
I'm anxious.
And it's usually here. (chuckles)
It's usually something in this dynamic.
- Yeah. - Right?
- When I would compulsively shop for compact discs
and lie about it.
Rae would get neck aches.
And after a while she figured out if I got a neck ache,
this guy is lying to me.
- He doesn't get away with anything.
- Yeah.
- How are you, Gabor Maté, not processing your trauma?
- How am I not processing it?
- Yeah, because like, if you are not doing it,
that's like Steve Jobs going:
"I couldn't get my phone to work."
- That's another traumatized person, by the way,
whose cancer is everything to do with
the childhood trauma that he experienced,
but that's another book and another story.
- So you sort of are a bit like in the Matrix,
when Neo sees everything's made out of numbers,
you look at people and you see all their trauma and damage?
- That's what I see.
Until I realized that I was traumatized,
which really wasn't until my late 30s and mid-40s,
and began to realize that it didn't have to be this way,
that there were reasons for it,
and I started looking for those reasons.
So I started waking up fairly late in life.
I was a driven, workaholic doctor.
Now why was a driven workaholic doctor?
Because the message I got as an infant
is that the world didn't want me.
Now how do you deal with not being wanted?
You make yourself needed.
So if you're traumatized
and if you don't think you're lovable,
my god, go to medical school.
Now they're going to want you all the time.
When they're dying, when they're being born,
every moment in between, and that's highly addictive,
because you get the validation all the time.
A lot of people that go into medicine
the last thing they want is to be open and vulnerable.
In fact, what they want is the authority
of the white coat and the stethoscope.
And medical school is very hard on people.
You might look at it almost
as a selection process that weeds out
the people that are too vulnerable.
The long hours, the deference to unreasonable authority,
the stress that you are willing to subject yourself to,
and these are the people that, like me, become physicians.
So that selects out against the vulnerable.
I went to medical school here at UBC.
At that time, we did not get a single lecture of trauma.
We did not even hear the word.
They still don't hear the word trauma in medical school.
So I've looked at the whole range of human experience
from birth to death because I've worked in obstetrics
and I've worked in palliative care
and everything else in between.
The modern medical paradigm in practice
separates mind from the body
and it separates the individual from the environment.
So when you look at, there's an epidemic
of asthma right now in North America,
more and more people, kids are being diagnosed with it,
it's all about, or largely about,
the increasing stress in our society.
So it's a cultural manifestation,
and this is completely missing in medical practice.
If you look at Black Americans,
Black Americans are more likely to get prostate cancer
and more likely to die of it,
and not because of a lack of medical care.
Maybe there's something about being a minority
in this particular culture that is so highly stressful
that it deranges the immune system.
If you look at the asthmatic Afro-American woman,
is that asthma a manifestation of her own pathology?
Or is it reflecting a social malaise?
Which means the emotion, whatever you've experienced,
probably suppressed rage or shame,
whatever you experience,
actually affects the physiology of your lungs.
Medicine is very interesting that way.
If you go to a dermatologist with an inflamed skin,
what kind of cream are they going to give you?
Anybody know?
Steroid cream, right.
If you go to a rheumatologist with an inflamed joint,
what medication are they going to give you?
Steroids very often.
If you go to a lung specialist with asthma,
what kind of inhaler are you going to get?
Steroid.
If you go to a gastroenterologist
with an inflamed intestines,
what kind of medication are you gonna get?
Steroids.
Now, what are steroids?
They're copies of cortisol.
What is cortisol?
The stress hormone.
We're treating everything with stress hormones.
Maybe it should occur to us
that stress has something to do
with the onset of these conditions.
The fundamental problem is capitalism,
or I should say materialism.
As long as the research is driven by the profits
of pharmaceutical companies,
what's going to drive the education of physicians
except the profit motive of pharmaceutical companies?
I mean, it's just obvious.
People have to be seen as automatons,
as beings without really emotional needs
or spiritual needs.
As globalization and globalized materialism
spreads throughout the world,
so there's auto immune disease
spreading throughout the world
in societies that hardly even knew them before.
Diseases, whether mental or physical,
are normal responses to abnormal circumstances,
and what would be considered normal
in this society is often actually insane.
In the most health obsessed humans society ever,
all is not well.
In the US, the richest society in history,
fully half of the citizens have a chronic disorder
such as high blood pressure or diabetes.
Illness is when part of an organism,
starts working against the overall benefit
of the organism.
So that say, in an autoimmune disease,
the immune system attacks the host organism.
So a system that was designed by nature to protect you
now it turns against you.
Cell division, which is meant to be coordination
with the needs of the entire organism,
gets out of hand and now you've got cancer.
The search is always to find out
what's wrong with the individual cell,
or how do you kill the abnormal cells?
So the treatment is restricted to the biological plane.
We either cut it out or we poison it or we burn it.
That's our approach to treating cancer.
Most chronic illness is a way of the body saying no
when the person suppress their no's
in order to fit in.
I'm saying that when the illness comes along,
we can just look upon it as a nuisance to get rid of
and an enemy to fight,
or we can say, okay, well, it's here now.
What's the teaching?
Which it doesn't mean that we don't accept treatment
or we don't do our best to heal,
but that, as part of that healing process,
we actually ask ourselves
what does this mean about my life and my relationships
and particularly about how I treat myself?
What is the teaching?
- My name is Tim.
I'm 51-years-old.
I was given a diagnosis of prostate cancer
about a year and a half ago.
I actually had a full, radical prostatectomy,
so that means the whole removal of my prostate
which was no walk in the park.
It's quite a, quite an extensive surgery.
In October they did a bone scan
and found that there was multiple areas