Moment 210: Dr. Gabor Maté: Your Trauma Is Secretly Controlling You! (Until You Try This)

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

Speaking about our early experiences, the first word in the sort of subtitle of your book is the word trauma. It's a word that I've talked about a lot on this podcast, and I've had a lot of people here that have opened up about their traumas. How do you define trauma? I know society has defined it in its own way, but how do you define it?

Gabor Maté (0:17)

I define it very specifically. It's not something bad that happens to you. It's not that, you know, I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized. No, you weren't. You were just sad, although you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized. Trauma means a wound. That's the literal meaning of the word. It's a Greek word for wounding. So trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain and it behaves like a wound. So on the one hand, a wound, if it's very raw, if you touch it, it just really hurts. So if I have a wound around not being wanted, then, or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound. So in a nonsense, trauma is an unhealed wound that touched, we get triggered. That's what triggering means, by the way. So an old wound gets activated or touched. The other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over, and scar tissue has certain characteristics. It's thick, it has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling in it. So people traumatize, disconnect from their feelings.

Scar tissue is rigid, it's not flexible, so we lose kind of response flexibility. So when something happens, we tend to react in typical, stereotypical, predictable, dysfunctional ways, because of the rigidity, and scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh. So people who are traumatized tend to be stuck in emotional states that characterized their development when they were traumatized. So when somebody says to you, don't be such a baby, doesn't sound very pleasant, but there's some truth to it. It means that you're probably reacting according to the lines of some wound that you sustained as an infant, and now you're reacting as if that wound was happening all over again. This is what one of my friends in the trauma world, Peter Levine, calls the tyranny of the past. So something happens in the present, and we react as if we were back there in the past when this first happened. And we're not in the present moment at all.

Steven Bartlett (2:30)

And I was trying to figure out how many people, as a percentage of the population, have a, have trauma. But then I, you know, I read this stat with 60% of adults say that they've had a sort of a traumatic early upbringing or whatever, or traumatic events from their childhood. But then I thought, maybe everybody has trauma.

Gabor Maté (2:47)

It depends on how we understand trauma. So if we understand trauma, it's only the really terrible things that happen to people, which do happen to people. You know, in the book, I talked about a British friend of mine who was no living in Canada. They are a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher and a psychologist and an artist, actually. And they grew up in some orphanage here in Britain where they were racially taunted every morning. You know, words that are in the book, by your permission, which I'm not going to cite here publicly. And that gave her a sense of deficient, a sense of self that I'm just no good enough, that I don't belong and so on. There's those obvious traumas, or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused. So men who are sexually abused, according to a Canadian study, have tripled the rate of heart attacks as adults. You know, and all kinds of physiological reasons. Well, that should be the case. So there's those self-evident, big T traumas that we call big T trauma, T with a capital T, trauma with a capital T. There's a certain percentage of the population, much larger than we think, subject to that. If you include all the known factors, such as physical, sexual, emotional abuse, spanking, by the way, has not been shown to be as traumatic as harsher forms of physical abuse. Spanking, which is still recommended by so-called experts, who should remain unnamed for the moment. The death of a parent, violence in a family, violence, parental violence against each other, a parent being jailed, a parent being mentally ill, did I say a parent being addicted, a rancorous divorce. These are the identified big traumas, big deep traumas, not to mention poverty, not to mention extreme inequality, war and so on. But then, if you remember that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you, it's the wound. People can be wounded, not just by bad things happening to them, but small children can be wounded in loving families where they don't get their needs met. I mean, that's obvious in the physical sense. If a child doesn't get proper nutrition, their body will suffer, their mind will suffer. We're also creatures with the emotional needs as important as our physical needs. So when the child's emotional needs are not met, that child is wounded. And that's what we call small T-trauma, which is not the big ticket events such as I described. But just the child's need to be loved unconditionally, to be held when distressed, to be responded to, to be seen, to be heard, to be allowed their full range of emotion without them being stamped on in the name of so-called discipline.