Gabor Mate's death threat - part two

Spoiler alert: I haven't died yet... but this is a long and heavy post. Skip it if you are in the mood for a giggle. Giggles to come in future posts, I promise.

‘No baby is born a people pleaser,’ explains Dr Mate after issuing his death threat.

‘Have you ever met a one day year old baby who says “Oh my gosh, mom and dad are working so hard I better not bother them”. When they have needs and emotions, they express them.’

‘When people say I’m a people pleaser, that's not how they were born, they became that to be accepted.’

Mate explains that the two human needs that drive us: the need for attachment and the need for authenticity. When we are born we have both. We need our parents to care for us (attachment) in order to survive. We also need to feel all our feelings and express them to survive. If we are hungry, cold, in pain etc, we need to scream that out and get people’s attention.

However, as we get older a tension develops between authenticity and attachment.

‘Attachment is drive to be close to somebody, to be taken care of. Or to take care of the other for that matter. But we also have this need also to experience all our emotions because that’s our authentic nature. However, what happens is, if the parents, because of their own histories and training or a stupid advice they hear from parenting experts, suppress the child or demand that the child does not express or experience all their emotions, that child has a decision to make and I don't mean a conscious one.

‘The decision is: ‘I can be attached or I can be be authentic but I can’t be both’. And what’s going to go in every case is the authenticity because we cannot survive without attachment. So people pleasing is a survival adaptation which becomes woven into the personality. People pleasing necessarily involves suppressing one’s own emotions and needs so saying no becomes impossible with consequences that we talked about.’

‘Have you ever seen any two year olds? Gabor Mate asks.

Yes, I say.

‘What’s the first word they say?’

‘Mama?’ I suggest.

‘It’s no. You tell them to put their shoes on and they say NO! Nos allow the child to develop their own preferences behind a wall of nos. If you’re planting a tree in your backyard and there are deer or rabbit around, you build a fence. The individual will is so easily overwhelmed by the parents’ will, so nature creates a little wall of nos so that the child can figure out what I really want. If, in order to fit in one has to suppress one’s no, one loses one’s no. Then one becomes a subject over everybody else’s will and desires. Then your yeses are affected too. You’re saying all the fake yeses and you’re trying to cater to everyone. Your immune system is just being crushed.’

He says that our immune system mirrors our emotional system. Both are there to defend us. Our anger acts as a protection, to alert us to a danger or someone crossing our boundaries, just as our immune system acts as defence against bugs. If we repress our emotions we also repress our immune system.

As someone who gets ill a lot - and represses her emotions a lot - this blew my mind.

I ask him about depression, which I also seem to slip into easily, and he says it’s all the same.

‘What does it mean to depress something?’ he asked.

‘To push down?’ I say.

‘Yeah. What gets pushed down in depression? Sadness - because those feelings were not acceptable at some point. We talk about this disease of depression - for Christ’s sake it’s a coping mechanism as, all mental illness is. Chronic physical illness has to do with adaptations as well. And there’s one theme - the disconnection from the self, that moment where you do not allow yourself to either honour or even be in touch with your own feelings about something. Most often it’s not even conscious.’

‘These patterns that I described, they are not anybody’s true nature. They are everybody’s second nature. Our second nature becomes our personality. You develop these patterns in childhood, not because you made a mistake, because that’s how you survived. I mean, a lot of families demand that people suppress the real selves in order to fit in. And once you do that, it becomes an automatic way of being in a world. It takes a lot of undoing and often diseases is our wake up call.’

So what should we do when we get our wake up call?

Self awareness is the beginning, he says. Therapy, creativity and psychedelics can also help. He is a big fan of something called IFS (Internal Family Systems) which a kind of therapy I don’t know much about.

In last week’s post I talked about how we should celebrate every time we feel guilt at saying no. Guilt is a sign that we have looked after ourself.

He also said: ‘Guilt is what I call a stupid friend. The guilt is built into you as a child in order to maintain a relationship with your parents. So whenever your own needs would clash with your parents’ expectations or needs, that guilt would kick in and say come on Marianne. So guilt is a friend but it’s a stupid friend because it doesn’t learn that it is no longer required. It doesn’t get that you no are longer, this four-year-old, three-year-old… How old is your guilt?’ he asks me.

Two I say instantly.

And suddenly I have an image of being on the kitchen floor in my childhood home. I am sad and alone but I can’t cry because mum is looking after the baby.

The image is so clear, as is the feeling that I can’t get upset or make a noise.

I tell him about the image and find myself saying: ‘My little sister came 18 months after me and mum was exhausted and I think I had this feeling very early on that mum needs to look after the baby, so be quiet, you know?’

He nods. His Basset Hound eyes look at me from behind red rimmed glasses. There is a moment of quiet. I talk again:

‘The other thought that comes into my head, is a Catholic thing… I went to convent school when I was still three. We were told ‘the last shall be first and the first shall be last’ - which I took to mean that being a good person means putting yourself last always. And so I have this moral battle anytime I don’t do something for someone else.’

He shakes his head.

‘That selflessness is a natural attribute of human beings, long before Catholicism came along. We lived in small band hunter gatherer groups, where communality and generosity were the coin by which people lived, that’s our nature. So you don’t have to teach it. It develops naturally. With compassion and love, you will naturally be loving and compassion. It’s not a moral stricture that has to be drilled into you. It’s a normal human capacity and it develops not by scaring children, but by giving them safety. The church scares people into something that’s their natural attribute if only you left them alone to develop a natural, healthy way.’

The Church, I realised, made me feel like any ‘no’ or looking after myself was a sign of selfishness, and ‘badness’ instead of a natural human need to rest or look after myself. The Church taught me to dismiss all my natural feelings and reactions. To push down all my ‘nos’.

He continues: ‘The Church has got so far away from the teaching of Jesus… I mean, my only problem with Christianity is that there’s no Christ in it. The authentic sayings of Jesus are full of safety, non judgement and acceptance. All that other stuff is the judgement and hellfire, that’s not Jesus at all.’

As he talks, and I think of the things I’ve said, I want to dismiss my feelings and experiences as insignificant and silly. I have had a charmed life. An easy life. A life full of love and safety. Pull yourself together is the phrase that goes around in my head. Get over yourself. And yet. I have been shaped by things. We all have. And the dismissal of myself is what I need to unlearn, something perhaps, that many of us, need to unlearn.

And that takes time, gentleness and, fortunately, a sense of humour.

So are you ready for a therapy joke?

‘Have you heard of Catholic Alzheimers? You forget everything but the guilt, Jewish Alzheimer’s is the same,’ says Dr Mate, adding that he’s available to talk at weddings, christenings and bah mitzvahs.

He didn’t really. He’s too busy giving journalists therapy.

xx

PART THREE OF ME GETTING PERSONAL THERAPY WITH GABOR MATE NEXT WEEK!

love

Mx

PS - I’m getting back to this newsletter after a couple of years of patchy service as I was writing my second book. Most posts won’t be this heavy. I will get back to recommending tv shows (speciality crime dramas), electric blankets and telling you funny things my neighbours say.

Last week was the first time I put on the option to pay to support this newsletter and twelve of you did. I actually teared up with your kindness and financial support. Writing isn’t my hobby, and I don’t have anyone else paying my bills. The truth is that right now I’m struggling to pay bills and it’s a huge relief to be supported. I’m not used to asking for help and it’s quite something to receive it. Thank you. I will do my best to bring value to you through my writing here. Mx