Trauma Doctor: If You Feel Lonely All The Time, Watch This | Dr. Gabor Maté
In a Nutshell
Trauma is not the event itself but the lasting wound in the nervous system that disconnects people from their authentic self, emotions, and body; healing means restoring wholeness by becoming vulnerable again. Childhood needs for unconditional acceptance, emotional freedom, and play are often unmet in modern society, leaving people rigid, defensive, and lonely. Loneliness is a perception created by self-protective barriers, and authentic connection, generosity, and spiritual grounding are essential for recovery and human flourishing.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Trauma comes from the Greek word for wounding. It is a psychic wound that leaves a scar and an imprint in the nervous system, body, and psyche. Trauma shows up in multiple ways that are not helpful later on. All trauma is stressful, but not every stress is traumatic. People often use the word trauma to refer to difficult experiences, which is not the same as being traumatized.
A wound has two features: when raw and open, it hurts intensely when touched. When it scars over, the scar tissue is hard, rigid, lacks flexibility, and does not grow. Scar tissue lacks sensation because it has no nerve endings. Trauma often stops emotional growth and development. People tend to be rigid when traumatized.
Trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is not the war, the abuse, or the pain felt. Trauma is the wound sustained as a result. The good news is that if trauma is the wound sustained, it can be healed at any time. What happened 75 or 78 years ago happened and cannot be changed, but the wound inside can be healed.
The Hungarian word for health begins with the word for wholeness. Health literally means wholeness. The English word for healing and health come from an Anglo-Saxon origin meaning wholeness. Healing is a sense of completion and wholeness. Trauma disconnects people from their true self, from their emotions, and from their bodies. Healing is the coming together of the self to become whole again.
Healing is not synonymous with cure. People can be cured from an illness without becoming whole. People can also become healed without being cured. Healing is not the absence of physical illness but the integrity of a person no longer split off from themselves.
Unhealed wounds may lie dormant for a long time. When something touches the wound, people react as if wounded for the first time. This is what is meant by being triggered. Time may scar the wound over and make it less available to immediate memory. But when something evokes it, the wound shows up in its full painful impact until work is done to heal it. Time by itself does not heal spontaneously or automatically.
Vulnerability comes from the Latin word vulnerary, meaning to wound. Vulnerability is the capacity to be wounded. Human beings are vulnerable from conception until death. When hurt in childhood and vulnerability becomes too painful to bear, people shut down their vulnerability by developing defenses such as being right, which creates a sense of power. When this happens, growth stops.
Everything in nature grows only where it is vulnerable. A crab inside a hard shell cannot grow. It must molt and make itself vulnerable to grow. A tree grows where it is soft and green and vulnerable, not where it is hard and thick. Vulnerability is essential for growth. To access vulnerability, people must let go of defenses developed in childhood. This is why growth involves growing pains.
Children can be wounded by obvious mistreatment, abuse, violence in the family, addiction, or rancorous divorce. But wounding also occurs more insidiously when basic needs are not met.
Children have inherent expectations, not conscious ones, but expectations built into the organism. The lungs are an inherent expectation for oxygen. Children need unconditional loving acceptance by multiple adult caregivers. Children need not have to work to make the relationship with their parents work. They do not have to be pretty, cute, compliant, clever, or successful to be accepted.
Children need the freedom to experience all emotions nature endowed them with. Brain circuits exist for anger, love, play, lust, seeking, and curiosity. The fourth essential need is free play out in nature, spontaneous, creative, imaginative play, which is essential for healthy brain development. This need is shared with other animals. Baby elephants, bear cubs, puppies, and lion cubs all play.
In modern society, cognitive development is prioritized over play. Children are deprived of play by gadgets that deprive them of imagination. This undermines brain development. Environmental conditions in society are inimical to healthy human unfoldment. This explains rising rates of childhood anxiety, ADHD, depression, suicide, and medication use. These issues arise not because parents do not love their children or are not trying, but because of conditions under which parenting takes place.
Pain is inevitable in life. There is no reason to deliberately expose children to pain. The question is how to support children when they experience it. A puppy will die, a grandfather will die, a friend will not want to play. Pain does not have to become traumatic.
Humans have a brain circuit for panic and grief because life brings loss. Grief is essential for life. Grief is coming to terms with the fact that something is gone and will not come back. For a small child, even what looks like small losses can be very painful. Validating a child's emotions helps them accept the loss, move through it, and learn they can endure difficult emotions without falling to pieces. The circuitry for grief needs to be allowed to do its work.
Whether delving into the past is helpful depends on what is happening with the individual. The effects of trauma mean wounds of the past keep showing up in the present. It is not about delving into the past and dwelling on it, but dealing with how the past shows up in the present. This is what Peter Levine calls the tyranny of the past. Going back to think about childhood stories does not help. What helps is dealing with emotions arising now as a result of what happened and how those emotions affect life in the present moment. It is about the present, not the past. It is about choices available now.
A therapist once said that if parents did not know how to hold a child, the child develops the mind to hold themselves with. Safety is found in the mind created. The human mind, the ordinary egoic human mind, is basically a defensive structure. It is a response to pain. It is afraid of pain and designed to keep people from experiencing pain. The mind is worried, anxious, and defensive. When it comes to change and vulnerability, the mind wants to defend against it. This comes out of fear from childhood experience where pain was not held.
Addiction is one such defensive structure. Keith Richards said about heroin use that the contortions one goes through are just not to be oneself for a few hours. The mind protects against the pain of being oneself with ideas, beliefs, certainties, endless desires, and artificial needs. The mind is afraid to let go because if it lets go, one becomes a helpless child again.
No two children have the same two parents and no two children have the same childhoods even in the same biological family. One child came along at a different time and had different experiences. Birth order affects how children experience parents. Degrees of sensitivity also differ. Sensitive comes from the Latin word sentire, to feel. The more sensitive a person is, the more they feel.
In a nourishing, supportive, grounded environment, a sensitive child becomes intuitive, a creator, an artist, an actor, or a leader. In an environment with pain, the sensitive child suffers more pain than a less sensitive one and has more reason to escape from the pain. Addictions are escape routes from pain. The child who does not become an addict has not necessarily escaped but may have developed different coping mechanisms, such as becoming driven to succeed and never fail.
Loneliness is always perception. There is a difference between being alone and being lonely. Alone is a fact that can be embraced. Loneliness has an emotional charge and is a matter of perception. One can be alone and not lonely, or surrounded by people and completely lonely. Loneliness comes from how open and vulnerable one is willing to be, and what defenses have been erected that keep one from contacting others. People unwittingly generate loneliness.
The world is getting more stressed, split, hostile, less welcoming, more dangerous, and more alienating. Isolation and loneliness are rising. When people experience pain, change, stress, or danger communally, it is bearable. When alone with it, it becomes less bearable. Capitalist values of aggressive individualistic ruthless greed and competition do not reflect human needs or human nature as evolved. The more the world gets this way and the more isolated people become, the more vulnerable they are to being hurt by the world they live in.
In society, elders are referred to as the elderly. This society defines people in terms of economic value and tends to discard people not perceived as having economic value as producers or consumers. In other functioning cultures, elders are respected, have a purpose, have wisdom, experience, vision, and have let go of attachments youth engages with. They have much to offer.
Loneliness is created in a society with rigid and limited values. For many people, their world begins and ends with their own age group, which is a developmental disaster. Humans evolved in touch with multiple people of multiple ages. Isolating people by age limits development and possibilities.
There is no definable human nature. Buddha was a human being. Hitler was a human being. One was full of compassion, love, and giving. The other was full of greed, aggression, and hatred. What exists is a certain human potential based on human needs. If those needs are met, development will be healthy and potential will be realized. If needs are frustrated, as they were in Hitler's case as a terribly abused child, what results is hatred, rage, and murderous venom.
When coupled with political power, the results are seen. This is not human nature. It is human nature thwarted because needs were not met in a society incapable of meeting people's needs. Human nature is not a given. What exists is human potential based on human needs. If needs are satisfied, people will be connected and generous. Most people want to be kind. When somebody does something selfish or greedy, it is called human nature. When somebody is kind or generous, it is never called human nature. When the body feels more at ease and experiences more peace, it is when one has been kind and generous authentically, not out of duty. When grasping and greedy, there is more tension and discomfort inside. This indicates that nature wants to be aligned with connection, generosity, and giving.
Spirituality means a sense of connection to something larger, difficult to define and possibly different for every person or group, but something beyond the limited confines of both body and the egoic mind. This is human nature. Indigenous traditions talk about the medicine wheel with quadrants involving emotions, physical bodies, social relationships, and spiritual selves. Being grounded in all four quadrants is necessary to be fully whole. There is something in spirituality that is really essential to
There is something in spirituality that is really essential to us. Each person has to discover for themselves what that is if they don't have a tradition that already grounds them in it.
Dr. Maté noted that this interview was unlike any he had experienced before.
Authenticity - Dr. Maté received this advice from his aunt, who was a Holocaust survivor and ophthalmologist. When he was a confused young man acting out, she quoted the famous passage from Hamlet: "unto yourself be true and it follows this night to day that then thou can't speak false to any man." So be true to yourself.
"That advice has always stayed with me."
Authenticity has been a major theme in Dr. Maté's life.
Nothing specific came to mind for Dr. Maté regarding bad advice he had received.
Dr. Maté mentioned that what other people think of him is something he once valued more. While he acknowledges it still exists, he is no longer attached to it.
Dr. Maté's purpose is that people are free - free from limitations of culture, limitations of their own past, limitations of their own minds, and free politically.
Dr. Maté declined to answer this question, explaining that if he were coercing and creating the impression that one had to do anything, that would already defeat its own purpose. He used a physical demonstration with the interviewer - asking them to lean forward and put out their hand, then pushing on it - to illustrate how people naturally resist when they sense a "had to." As soon as people sense that there's a "had to," there's going to be resistance.
Keep Jay Shetty Podcast in your library
Save the videos and channels worth coming back to, and find them again in one place.
