Gabor Mate - The final part of the trilogy

Plus Artist's Way check in this evening & thank you

‘The question is not why the addiction but why the pain?’ said Dr Gabor Mate.

He spent years working with drug addicts in Vancouver but believes most of us are addicted to something.

‘Let me give you a definition of addiction,’ he says. ‘So addiction is manifested in any behaviour that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves but suffers negative consequences as a result and does not give up despite the harm. It could be drugs or nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, opiates, it could also be sex, gambling, pornography, internet gaming, shopping, eating, work, extreme sports. I could go on… Let me ask you, do you have an addictive pattern?’

And we’re back to my personal therapy.

I could pick from several: hours of television, bottles of wine, online scrolling… but instead I tell him I overwork.

‘What do you get from it?’ He asks. ‘What did you like about it in the short term?’

‘A sense of importance and achievement, and working in newspapers you are very much needed.’

‘So the feeling of being needed and important - is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ He asks.

‘It’s a good thing,’ I reply.

‘The addiction is not your problem, it was an attempt to solve a problem. And the question is why on God’s green earth did you not have a sense of importance just for your existence as a human? Why did you have to prove to yourself that people want you or that they should want you? Every infant needs to have that sense of being wanted and celebrated - that’s why my mantra on addiction is not why the addiction but why the pain? The pain of not feeling wanted or needed? That’s painful. That means that in this society there are very few people who don’t have some kind of addiction - addiction is a normal response to trauma.”

Mate explains that he also has a pattern of overworking, due to his childhood. Maté was born into the Jewish ghetto of Budapest in 1944, just weeks before the Nazis seized Hungary, to an overwhelmed mother and an absent father, who had been sent to a forced-labor camp. At a year old, he was handed by his mother to a stranger who was assigned his safety.

‘I became a workaholic who defined his existence by how busy he was because the message I got as an infant is that I wasn’t wanted. I mean, my mom gave me to a stranger on the street. She did that to save my life. But what’s the message to me? I’m not wanted. Now if you’re not wanted, go to medical school for God’s sakes. They’re gonna want you all the time. But that means I’m being driven by the need to be wanted so what message did my kids get when I wasn’t around? They’re not wanted.’

‘This is how we pass trauma on inter generationally - it’s completely unintended. So I don’t blame any parents, nor should any parents blame themselves but the point is we can reverse these patterns. That’s the point.’

I ask him if we are overdoing it with the trauma talk. His childhood was by any standards traumatic - mine wasn’t.

I told him about a headline I’d seen that asked: if everything is trauma, is anything? He doesn’t buy it - if anything, he says we are under-recognising trauma. However we are also misusing the term - so if we have a crap day at work, the chances are it wasn’t traumatic - it was stressful.

The word trauma comes from the Greek word for ‘wound.’

There can be two types of wound, he says. There’s the capital-T traumatic events, which include things like being abused as a child and the loss of a parent. Then there are small-T traumas that come from not having your needs met as a child. Even the most loving parents can unwittingly cause trauma for their children - he knows because he did this himself.

In short: ‘Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you in response to what happens to you. The essence of trauma is a disconnection from the self.’

Left unhealed, trauma impacts every part of our lives: how we feel about ourselves, how we see the world, the kind of relationships we get into - and our mental and physical health.

According to Mate trauma comes from not just our own experiences but our parents and their parents’ experiences. ‘Fundamentally when a child is conceived they are already inheriting the trauma and joys their parents are carrying.’

They are also inheriting the pain of the culture around them and he believes that Ireland, where my parents are from, is a deeply traumatised culture.

‘We’re talking about eighty years of foreign occupation, and sometimes brutal occupation and also, of course, civil war of a murderous kind, then the Potato Famine and the recent Troubles. And, of course, the longer story of the finally publicly acknowledged sexual abuse - and abuse in general - of children by religious authorities which are meant to represent God on earth. So the trauma and pain in Irish culture is immense. The resultant escape into alcoholism, which the Irish almost pride themselves on, is really a trauma response, a way of killing your pain,’ says Dr Mate.

Of course Ireland is not the only country dealing with trauma. He cites the persecution of Canada’s Indigenous people and the ensuing addiction, illness and suicide, as well as the legacy of racism and slavery in the US. In most cases, he writes, trauma is multigenerational: ‘We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.’

In his telephone sized book The Myth of Normal, Mate explains that nobody is to blame for this. Everyone is doing their best in a toxic system which does not meet many of our human needs for connection and support and healing.

What’s more, Mate believes that modern medicine often fails to treat the whole person and ignores how today’s over-working, over-consuming, individualist culture stresses our bodies, burdens our immune systems and undermines emotional balance.

In various language the word health stems from the word ‘whole.’ Healing is when we get back in touch with our feelings and become whole again.

Our healing he says: ‘starts with waking up to what our bodies are expressing and our minds are suppressing.’

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THE ARTIST’S WAY

If anyone fancies joining The Artist’s Way zoom, we have just finished week one and will be checking in this evening at 7pm (UK Time) on this zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87129520602?pwd=bktkbjJWQkIzREszcnhDRHI4bGlXQT09

Meeting ID: 871 2952 0602

Passcode: 893769

This is just for people doing The Artist’s Way process.

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