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Feb. 23, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:50
1591 The Biology, Morality and Politics of Addiction - Dr Gabor Mate - The Freedomain Radio Interview

Dr Gabor Mate reveals the biological basis of addiction, and the insanity of the statist war on drugs.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have on the line Dr.
Gabor Mate, who ran a private practice, a family practice in East Vancouver for over 20 years.
He's also the medical, was also the medical coordinator of the palliative care unit at Vancouver Hospital for seven years.
He is currently the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource center for the people of Vancouver's downtown Eastside.
Many of his patients suffer from mental illness, drug addiction, and HIV, or all three.
He has had regular medical columns in the Vancouver Sun and the National Globe and Mail.
He is the author of four books, When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress, and Scattered Minds, A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.
The third book, Hold On to Your Kids, Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, he co-authored with developmental psychologist Gordon Newfield.
Most recently published is the highly recommended, at least by me, In the Realm of the Hungry Ghost, Close Encounters with Addiction.
So thank you so much for For taking the time, and I'd like to start, if I may, by referencing a comment that you've made many times, I think, which is that the current scientific research on addiction is not at all in step with, I think you refer to it, and I would certainly agree, the medieval practice of criminalizing addiction.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where the science of addiction is at the moment and how far it is removed from public policy.
Sure. Before I do, I just need to mention that for the titles of my books, especially for the first two, you gave the Canadian subtitles and the Canadian titles.
The American titles are somewhat different.
We can talk about that later, but the books have been published in Canada originally and then in the States.
Unfortunately, the American publishers sometimes change my titles so that Well, please do reference them because the majority of my listeners are American, so please make sure that people can get a hold of them.
My book on Attention Deficit Disorder in the States is entitled, Scattered, How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It.
And the subtitle of my book on stress and illness and the mind-body unity, when the body says no, in the U.S., is understanding the stress-disease connection.
Now, people can get these books either at Amazon.com with the American titles or Amazon.ca with the Canadian titles, but that distinction needs to be made clear, all the more so since an American doctor has written a book called Scattered Minds on ADD, which is published with that title in the U.S. by the same publisher that published my book, Scattered, so it gets really complicated and I won't even go into the politics of it.
To get back to your question, though, which is much more interesting to me as to how the Our current attitude towards drug addiction and particularly social and legal policies towards addicts are completely ignorant of and in the dark ages when it comes to the state-of-the-art science.
So what we know scientifically is that addiction is not a choice that anybody makes.
Regardless of a book by a recent American academic entitled Addiction, a Disorder of Choice, there's no choice involved whatsoever.
The people that are engaged in it, and almost any addiction here, are driven to it.
And what they're driven to it, in the immediate sense, is their brain biology, which in some ways is lacking in important substances.
For example, people that need to use opiates are lacking, or their circuits of endorphins are impaired.
And endorphins are the brain's own chemicals of pain relief, pleasure and reward, and love and connection.
Those circuits have to be functioning for us to be able to have adequate pain relief internally, an adequate sense of joy and reward, and an adequate sense of connection and belonging and love.
Without those chemicals, those qualities are lacking from our lives.
Biologically, people that are impaired in those circuits will be prone then, when they use an addictive substance like heroin for the first time, to become hooked on it.
You see, the thing is that most people who try most drugs never become addicted.
I mean, people who try alcohol don't necessarily become alcoholics.
Most people who try cigarettes don't become nicotine addicts.
And most people who try heroin or crystal meth or cocaine don't become addicts either.
Which is not to say I'm recommending that anybody try those substances, but I am saying that the substances themselves cannot impose the addiction.
There has to be susceptibility there.
And that's really in the brain.
And that's why the question of choice is really a moot one.
Now, the other point about the science is that the brain biology itself is not genetically inherited, which is the common medical view, but on the contrary, it has to do with what happened to that person during their life.
In other words, the biology of the brain is programmed and largely determined by what happened during pregnancy and especially in the first three or four years of life.
That means that people with severe adversity and stress prenatally and postnatally have Very often impairments in their brain functioning of particularly important circuits.
Now, the truth about most hardcore substance users, including every client I've ever treated in North America's most concentrated area of drug use, which is Anchorage Downtown Eastside, the truth about all these people is that they're all abused as children.
Severely abused, as a matter of fact.
And so it's abuse and severe stress that impairs the biology of the brain in such a way It's to make that person almost a sitting duck for addictions later on when they come into contact with a potentially addictive substance.
So those are the two aspects. One is that it's largely biologically determined, number one.
And number two, the biology itself is determined by the early environment and not by heredity.
And the implications of that for prevention, first of all, has to do with how we look after kids and how we support pregnant women and how we It supports families at risk and of course also how in this society so many people are so heavily stressed for all kinds of reasons which impairs the development of the children's brains and that has many many implications for mental health and so on.
The treatment indication is that if we see addiction among other conditions not as a genetically inherited disease but as a problem of brain development then the question we'll be asking ourselves Knowing that the human brain can develop even later on in life, if the conditions are right, then the question we'll be asking ourselves is, what conditions do people need for their brains to develop properly at any age?
Now, the worst possible condition is when you stress and ostracize and criminalize and dehumanize people.
Under those conditions, there's no growth whatsoever.
So, the war on drugs, which is in fact a war on drug addicts, which is in fact a war on the most abused segment of our population from birth onwards, It's exactly the wrong thing to engage in if you're really intent on helping people and to help redeem them from their addictive habits.
And I appreciate that perspective and it's something that I was quite shocked to discover.
You've mentioned in your presentations Dr.
Felitti out of San Diego and I had a conversation with him where he sort of led me down this path and I produced a series It's called The Bomb and the Brain, where I'm trying to help people to understand the degree to which early trauma contributes to what are often called chosen addictive or self-destructive behaviors.
Why do you think it is so hard for this message to get through?
I mean, I have my own theories, but I always try to defer to those with expertise.
But why do you think it is such a tough perspective to get across?
Why do we just view these people as, you know, they're just like us, but they've made bad choices?
Well, first of all, I'm very glad to mention Vincent Felitti.
Him and I are going to have dinner this Friday night in BAMF, Alberta.
We were both presenting at a conference and that certainly gained a lot from following his work and from having met him.
The difficulty is, first of all, that we live in this industrialized society that sees everybody really as isolated, competitive individuals.
In a society like that, we don't tend to see the impact of the social environment on the shaping of the individual.
We just think everybody is responsible for everything that happens to them.
Now, while it's true that people have to take responsibility ultimately, it is not true that people have caused their lives.
I mean, nobody chooses to be born into a family where they're going to be abused.
Or nobody chooses to be born into a family where they're going to be racially ostracized, as happens to people still on both sides of the Forty-night parallel.
Thirty percent of my clients in the downtown east side are First Nations, Aboriginal Canadians, Canadian-Aided Indians, and they've had a horrendous history in this country of dislocation, genocidal policies, forced enrollment in residential schools where they were sexually abused for generations and their language was extricated.
They were beaten up if they spoke their native tongue.
Under such conditions, you create the template for addiction.
That's very much not in line with the individual ethic that we all make our own lives in that very narrow sense.
That's the first point. The second point is that in order to really understand the problem, this society would have to take a very hard look at itself.
People have a very hard time looking at themselves, both in this society In society, our leaders are always telling us that we live in the greatest.
Canadians say that they live in the greatest country in the world.
Americans think they live in the greatest country in the world.
If that's true, then if anything goes wrong, it can't be due to the society or the culture.
It's got to be the fault of the individual.
Number three, people are so addicted in our culture.
There's so many addictions. That suffuse our entire culture.
By addiction, I mean negative habits that have destructive consequences in our lives, but we continue to crave them and engage in them.
Who amongst us doesn't have those habits to one degree or another?
Look at the obesity epidemic.
Look at the shopping problems.
There's entire channels on television devoted to supporting people's addictions.
The shopping channel, for example, and so on.
And so that, given that so many people have these addictive issues in themselves, we tend to criticize and judge in others that which we don't wish to look at or that which we're not comfortable in ourselves.
That's why Jesus said, before you try to remove the sliver from your brother's eye, remove the pole from your own eye.
Right, and I'd like to place that in context to people who don't know your work, that your definition of addiction is somewhat different than some of your contemporaries, which is that You don't believe that a substance is necessary for the definition of addiction, that for you, if I remember rightly, it is negative or destructive behavior that is involved with compulsion and repetition and falling off the wagon and getting back on the wagon and so on.
And I think... And craving and temporary pleasure, because you have to distinguish it from compulsive obsessive behaviors, where there's also repetition and negative consequences, but there's no craving or pleasure.
So any addictive... There's always a sense of immediate reward, pleasure, craving and relapse and negative consequences.
If you look at that, a sex addict is an alcoholic and somebody who's a workaholic is also an addict in the same way that a heroin addict is.
Not to the same degree perhaps and not to the same negative detrimental consequence, but the addiction process in the brain engages the same brain circuits, involves the same psychological dynamics, And it's an attempt, a desperate attempt, to fill the same spiritual emptiness.
So yeah, absolutely. Addiction is not necessarily related to substances.
And I think if I... Sorry, go ahead.
I'm just going to complete the thought.
Given that there's so much of that in our society, it's much easier, of course, to see the addict as somehow separate from the rest of us.
Because if we saw the commonality, that would be shocking for ourselves.
And most people are not willing to do that.
Right. I mean, if we look at the consumption of resources, national and household debt, consumerism, and the addiction to work and finding meaning outside of integrity and relationships, in a sense, we could say that the culture is sick, but we put the most extreme addicts as the sort of whipping boys, as, in a sense, the Jesuses or the scapegoats that we punish for the sins of all.
Well... Yes, although Apogee is in a different category.
He took something on very consciously.
The addicts don't take anything on consciously.
They suffer a lot and we crucify them, but it's not a role that they've consciously taken on.
It's something that they've fallen into.
Finally, in terms of why there's such a barrier to understanding these issues, the medical profession itself It's firmly rooted in the 19th century when it comes to understanding these issues.
And despite all the research, I mean, what can I tell you?
I've become a best-selling author simply because I write about science that the medical profession doesn't look at.
The whole mind-body unity and illness and health and the role of stress and potentiating all kinds of diseases including cancer and everything else.
The brain developmental data that tells us how the human brain Develop an interaction with the environment.
It's not even controversial, but it's not taught in the medical school yet.
Most physicians have no idea that the human brain is actually shaped in many ways by the emotional environment.
Therefore, that robs us of tools to understand people and also robs us of tools to help them.
It's a very conservative profession and accepted ideas are...
Although we like to think of ourselves as having a scientific perspective, We have a very narrow view of that science.
And anybody who's engaged in this kind of work, Vincent himself, Dr.
Saliti, who's published these wonderful studies showing in multitudinous detail the impact of early trauma and stress on adult health and adult life.
He himself will tell you that he presents these papers that are published in bona fide and respectable journals.
He's invited to conferences.
He gives his talks and then nothing.
Nothing about medical practice or medical teaching changes.
In one of my books, I have a chapter called the Bermuda Triangle.
I refer there to this propensity of research to happen, to be published and then disappear without a trace as if a ship had sunk somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle without any remnants of boat or crew to ever attest to their existence.
So that's how it is with a lot of this research as well.
And so these are all the reasons why our society is such a hard time understanding these factors.
Right. And I think it is a terrible thing.
And I think it will be looked back in the future as an absolutely criminal enterprise to criminalize these people who have these terrible problems which arise out of, as you say, early childhood experience or even prenatal experiences that have shaped who they are.
I was also quite...
That brings to mind what you just said.
When I talk about the criminal justice system, It's accurate.
The justice system is criminal.
Yes, I would certainly agree with that.
Now, you've also talked, and I found it quite fascinating, when you delve into brain science, and some of the experts I've talked to have been just fantastic this way, is the degree to which childhood bromides or cliches are thoroughly disproved by modern science.
And the one which I thought was quite fascinating that you talked about was, sticks and stones can hurt my bones, but sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
But some of the research seems to indicate that that is completely false, that the pain centers process physical pain in the same way that they process emotional or verbal abuse.
Well, as a matter of fact, the same brain centers deal with both kinds of pain.
So that if people are subjected to an experience of emotional rejection while undergoing a brain scan, The same part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, would light up.
It would light up as if you hurt them physically.
This is a part of the brain where the endorphins, the innate opiates of the brain, have many receptors.
When people are deeply hurt, they need to flood their brain with opiates.
That's why they use heroin. In fact, all the drugs are painkillers.
The issue in addiction is not just why the addiction, but always why the pain.
Again, that's where the childhood history comes into it.
It's being shown by research very clearly that the emotional rejection and abuse of children, quite apart from the physical aspects, are deeply wounding.
And not only are they deeply wounding, they're more confusing.
Because when you talk to people, if they were ever hit as children, they can at least relate to the pain of a child being hit.
But the way they were talked to, They tend not to distinguish anything bad.
Most of them think they deserve it, so that they were both hurt by it and at the same time rendered unconscious by it, so that they don't see their own suffering very clearly.
But it's registered in the brain in the form of implicit memory circuits loaded with messages of lack of self-worth, of self-disgust and shame.
And those triggers are then easily So those circuits are usually triggered by something in the present.
If you had the circuits deeply in your brain, embedded in them, and if you hadn't dealt with it, if I were to then say something aggressive to you, those brain circuits would be triggered, and if I did a brain scan on you, you could see them activated, and you would be in a state of shame and self-defense and shutdown in a matter of a second.
Right. And I think it's hard for people to recognize the degree to which our identities are shaped by the language and attitudes of those around us when we're growing up.
And so it's sort of, as you say, it's not something external that happened to us with verbal abuse.
It becomes who we are and becomes undifferentiated in a way that doesn't seem to happen with physical or sexual abuse.
Well, unfortunately, I wish I could even agree with the last statement because sexual abuse itself, I mean, I know people who are sexually abused and Very often, until they deal with it, what very often will happen to a child sexually abused will be that she'll conclude or he'll conclude that if this terrible thing is happening to me, I must be a terrible person.
Then they live their lives either trying to soothe the pain or trying to compensate for it by all kinds of behavioral mechanisms.
For example, trying to be perfect and lovable and so on, which will stress them even more and create illness for them.
What is true to say, as the great British child psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott once pointed out, that there's two things that can go wrong in childhood.
One is when something happens that shouldn't have happened, such as abuse, overt physical, verbal or sexual abuse.
But the other is when things don't happen that should have happened.
And even if no abusive incidents occur in a child's life, either verbally or physically, If simply the parents are too stressed or distracted or shut down emotionally, to emotionally connect with the child and to attune with the child, just that attunement not happening itself is traumatic for the child.
And that's even harder to remember.
Because while people might recall what was said to them or what was done to them, they will not recall what didn't happen to them.
Right. Yeah, the life unlived.
Exactly. And that also becomes part of their makeup, as you say.
Right. Now, when I, and I think this has been the experience of the listeners who I've talked to about this as well, when I began to delve into this material, it really is, it leans against notions of free will, of course, right?
Because you realize the degree to which life and brain is shaped by environment and circumstance and family and all those other kinds of things.
And I was really encouraged and was fascinated to hear more of your thoughts about something that you said in a presentation about The degree to which our impulses arise in our unconscious and then we almost create justifications for them after the fact.
And I think this has been fairly well demonstrated scientifically, even to the point where people's political opinions can be sort of predicted with good regularity by what happens in their amygdala response to fear stimuli.
But you had a focus on the old Socratic doctrine, right?
To know thyself.
That if you introspect, if you know yourself, if you get therapy, if you really try to understand yourself, You can see the formation of these impulses in your unconscious, which gives you more liberty to adjust how they express themselves.
Is that a fair way to characterize your position?
And I'd like if you could talk a little bit more about that.
Well, absolutely. It's a very succinct way of summing up what I have to say about it.
The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said that without consciousness there's no freedom.
So as long as I'm controlled by impulses based on childhood fears, As long as I'm controlled by chemical responses in my brain, ingrained in the prenatal or immediate postnatal period, how can I talk about being free?
Whatever choices I make are within a very narrow range, limited by the laterally programming.
Although in abstract, we can talk about freedom of choice, in practice, most people don't have it much of the time.
If you look at the brain sciences, you can see impulses arising.
The impulses arise Half a second before they act it out.
But most of that time, the person is not even conscious of the impulse arising.
They have a split second in which they recognize an impulse and to choose to act or not act on it.
The more impaired your development was, the less choice you have, the less your brain is capable of making free choices.
So it does take mindful awareness and introspection and reflection.
And of course, what does reflection mean?
Reflection is like reflect.
You look in a mirror, reflect.
So you have to have a mirror. There's mindfulness techniques that, of course, many traditions and programs teach.
There's also reflection that happens with a good counselor where they reflect back to you.
They don't tell you what to do.
They just reflect back to you what it is that you're manifesting at that moment.
You can see yourself as in a mirror.
But without that reflection on one level or another, there's just no self-knowledge and self-acknowledge.
There's just no freedom.
And I know that in my personal life.
And not only that, There's almost never absolute freedom until you reach absolute nirvana, like you become a Buddha.
There's just no absolute freedom at all because it depends too on how stressed you are.
When people are very stressed, then their impulse regulation circuits get overwhelmed by the stress and the freedom again disappears.
So everybody knows that sometimes when they're triggered and stressed, they'll behave in ways that later on they'll scratch their heads about.
That's because of that moment, they lack consciousness and without consciousness, They had no freedom and they were just automatic.
They become automatons to our brains at various times, especially when we're highly stressed.
That's certainly true for me.
It's true for a lot of everybody I know.
Oh yeah, I know. The stop and the pause and the breathing and the reflection is something that can very easily go by the wayside in a fight-or-flight response.
I think that you have to sort of practice that like an athlete practices for the big game.
You have to practice for those moments of stress in your life with regular self-awareness so that you can master those situations with much more regularity.
Yeah, and of course, if you're like me, as I wrote in my book, I have a profound relationship with meditation.
I think about it every day.
I'm aware of the need for it, but I'm just not so good at practicing.
Right. Until they allow it in a car while driving, it's really tough to fit in.
It should be mandatory in airplanes.
That's right, yeah.
Absolutely. There should be some yogic flyer up front of the plane instead of everybody relax.
That might even prevent some terrorism, too.
Now, here we're wandering into a realm that I know nothing about your opinions on, and I would appreciate it if you could just share your thoughts on this.
And I'll try to keep the question brief, though it is a complex question.
I will try to keep it brief because certainly people are much more interested in hearing what you have to say than what I have to say.
But I was really struck when you talk about the degree to which stress interferes with healthy functioning of mind and body and the oneness of the mind and body.
It has always struck me that if we look at adult addictions as the echo or complement of toxicity that occurred much earlier in life, particularly through early childhood experiences, It would seem to me that one of the things that would need to occur for somebody to gain more stability and more health in their life would be obviously to attempt to reform toxic relationships in his or her life,
but failing the ability to reform those relationships, to take space or to take a break from those relationships, that does conflict to some degree with Judeo-Christian and to some degree Buddhist teachings of forgiveness and acceptance, but it seemed to me that that would also clash With the degree to which these alters can be activated in the mind by repetitions of these toxic or abusive stimuli.
Where do you sort of sit along that continuum of forgiveness versus taking the necessary space to heal?
Right. I don't read Buddhist or Christian teachings that way, actually.
The question of toxic relationships, the first relationship that needs to be balanced is one with ourselves.
Abuse and trauma and stress in childhood would have no significance whatsoever if they didn't distort our relationship with ourselves.
If I could just have those experiences but remain intact, then so what?
I just had some bad experiences.
Life is tough. But the problem is, of course, that those experiences, because they shape us, distort our relationship with ourselves.
So I would not be...
You see, when you say toxic relationship, why would I be in a toxic relationship?
Only because I have a toxic relationship with myself.
If I accepted and respected myself, no relationship I'd engage in would be toxic.
Nobody would have that kind of power over me.
And I would simply, if somebody was that triggered or that unconscious that they had to act out their aggression on other people, I would not be in a relationship with them.
So that the toxicity is not in the relationship, it's still in oneself.
Now, when that healing happens internally, then you look at somebody else, then what do you see about them?
You see them That they are just programmed by their early pain.
It doesn't matter how aggressive and unpleasant and how unfair they might be acting.
Who are they? They're just another suffering human being who is being controlled by their negative, formative life experiences.
Well, once I understand that, what's there to forgive?
I mean, there's that saying, to understand it is to forgive.
And what Jesus says on the cross, forgive them for they know not what they do.
Anybody who thinks they've forgiven anybody, they haven't.
Because as long as you think there's anything to forgive, you haven't forgiven.
Once you get that, people are just unconscious.
Again, as Eckhart Tolle says, the greatest perpetrator of evil in life is just the human unconscious.
And when you get that people are unconscious, then how can you blame them for what they do?
So, that's not an intellectual question.
I'm not saying, therefore, you should forgive and And be in relationship with people that hurt you.
On the contrary, if you were not in a toxic relationship with yourself, you would never put yourself in those relationships in the first place and you wouldn't stay in them.
But in terms of forgiveness, forgiveness is just to understand that people are who they are.
Forgiveness is not an act.
It's not something I need to work on.
It's just something that really happens spontaneously once you really get that the people manipulating The strings of human puppets are really the embedded, ingrained patterns of the unconscious.
Right, okay. Yeah, I think I understand.
Let me just, again, I need to just make sure I understand what it is that you're saying as best I can.
And, you know, please, of course, feel free to correct me where I go astray, because I'm really trying to sort of fathom what you're saying.
So we can understand that people may not have the moral responsibility for what it is that they're doing because they are unconscious and they're acting out their own early pain.
That doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to stay or in fact I think if you say if you're not toxic in your relationship with yourself you won't stay in those relationships.
But that doesn't mean you will be consumed with anger towards those people for the rest of your life because you will understand that in a sense they've become a kind of unconscious predator That doesn't mean that they have moral responsibility any more than a shark or a lion would, but that doesn't mean that we jump into the shark tank or the lion cage.
Is that sort of what you mean?
Well, that's absolutely right. I mean, or in some cases, you might even choose to be in a relationship with them, but you would not choose to be in a toxic relationship with them, you know?
And if it's not possible to be in a non-toxic relationship, you just won't be in it.
Right, right. Or whether you're in a relationship with your non-toxic relationship is not the point.
The issue is, are you in a toxic relationship?
And that depends on you, not on the other person.
Now, if somebody makes it totally impossible for you, if every time I saw you, you came up with a knife, why would I want to ever see you again, you know?
So it depends on the individual case.
But the point is that it's not an issue of moral judgment.
It's just an issue of self-respect.
Right. Okay. That's very interesting.
I appreciate that. That's a very, very clarifying perspective.
Now, I was struck when you said that in your work on Vancouver's east side, and for those who aren't from Canada, that is, would it be fair to call it a ghetto in terms of how people in the United States or other countries might understand that location?
Well, I talk about it as a drug ghetto on the downtown east side, and it's a ghetto in a sense that it's got barriers.
Those people, there's no physical boundaries.
There would have been in the Jewish ghettos of Venice, for example, in the Middle Ages.
There's invisible barriers.
I also call it the drug gulag because it really is like a separate world inside the larger world.
And the people that are in it are pretty much constricted and restricted to that physical realm of a few block area.
When they go outside it, they don't know what to do with themselves.
Right. There are economic and legal forces.
And they're looked upon very badly by others.
So they'll tell you that.
And I was really struck by the degree to which sexual abuse in women seemed to be a necessary, though of course not always sufficient, cause for a drug addiction.
But it wasn't quite the same with men.
I think you said that every single female drug addict that you treated had been sexually abused often quite early in life.
And that was true for a good number of the men, but it wasn't quite 100%, if I remember your statistics right.
Well, given the gender relationships in our society, female children are more likely to be sexually abused than male children.
Right. But that doesn't mean that male children are not abused, they're just not sexually abused.
Right. I mean, you see, sexual abuse to me is not a...
It's a terrible thing, but it's not a...
Traumatic effect is not unique.
I mean, what it is, is that any situation where a child is objectified, where their needs are not taken into account, Whether you're being used to serve somebody else's purposes.
Whether the boundaries are physically invaded and psychologically they are considered to be chattels is abusive.
So that can take sexual forms.
In the case of girls, it often does.
In the case of boys, it can take other forms and often enough it's sexual but not always.
Right, right. Now, the last...
And again, I really do appreciate your time.
I mean, I could talk all day because I find your perspectives and your experience and your data absolutely fascinating.
But, you know, in the interest of you have a life as well, I would really, really like to focus on something that was really startling to me that you talked about, which is the degree to which we are not well suited or designed for the nuclear family and the degree to which the disintegration of the family...
It has created a sort of horizontal tribe of Lord of the Flies lost boys where children are relying on each other horizontally for feedback creating sort of gang mentalities and without particular leadership that's coming from a collective of responsible adults and the degree to which that is driving dysfunction within society.
That is a fascinating thesis.
If you could expand on that, I'd really appreciate it.
Sure. I first began to look at the question of what's happening to children when I became interested in ADD, which I was diagnosed myself in my early 50s.
And the idea that it was a genetic disease never made any sense to me.
Then I ran across the brain developmental data, which showed that the stress that affects those circuits in the brain.
But then I had to ask them the question, well, why are we seeing so much more of it?
Why are there so many millions of kids not being treated for that and other childhood conditions?
What is burgeoning?
epidemic of childhood mental health diagnoses.
Well, it can't be genetic because genes don't change in a population over 10, 15, 30, 40, even 100 years.
So there has to be something else.
And what's changed dramatically over the last 70, 80 years is the parenting environment.
Because children throughout history used to be brought up in a network of adult attachments.
There's the African saying, it takes a village to raise a child.
And that means that there has to be a whole set of nurturing adults.
If you look at Our society.
What do we call old people in our society?
What's our word for the old people, by the way?
The aged, the elderly...
Okay, good.
What do people in Aboriginal cultures call the older people?
The elders? The elders.
Do you notice the difference? The elderly versus the elders.
What is the implication? One is infirmity, the other is wisdom.
Totally. In other words, the one continues to be part of the community.
It's a multi-generational community.
And the young children are very much in relationship with several generations of nurturing adults, including some very wise older adults, not just their stupid young parents.
And neighbors and friends and so on are all considered to be relatives in a sense of emotional connection.
That's the healthy basis and throughout evolution and throughout human history, that's been the basis of child development and it still is.
In Aboriginal cultures.
If you look at Aboriginals, they used to reary their children before the coming of the Puritans.
It was in community.
It was non-punitive.
They didn't hit their kids. The Puritans thought that they spared the rod and spoiled the child.
They were shocked that the natives didn't hit their kids.
And so on. This is natural parenting.
Now, in the last 70, 80 years, the clan, tribe, community, village, neighborhood, extended family have become totally eroded.
People don't even know who their neighbors are.
and all the neighborhood institutions like the corner grocery, Mr.
Hooper and Sesame Street, the hardware store, the garage mechanic and all these adults that were not just playing an economical but there were also attachment figures in one another's and in the child's life have all disappeared and the nuclear family has become the basic unit and it itself has been stretched beyond the limit with the 35% divorce rate Very often, both parents are having to work.
Under such conditions, when parents are stressed, children's brains are stressed.
I've been referring to that in this entire discussion.
That's why, because of the stress-pending environment and the breakdown of traditional structures, is that we're seeing so much childhood dysfunction.
To take it a step further then, there are a lot of kids these days who don't have ADHD, who don't have a specific diagnosis, but who are still troubled, emotionally shut down, Bored with themselves, without any sense of purpose, unable to learn from negative experience, given to aggression and violence, and because of sexuality and so on.
What's going on? What's going on is that the human brain is programmed to attach...
The material I talked about to this point in this conversation is contained in my book on ADHD, which again in the US is called Scattered Minds.
This next bit is from my book, Hold On To Your Kids, Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers.
What's happening is that the human brain is programmed to attach.
It's instinctively and biologically programmed to attach.
It has to because the human infant and child is so utterly helpless and dependent.
Not only that, even as adults, we need relationships for all of our lives.
We're biologically and instinctually programmed to attach.
Large parts of our brain are designated simply to meet our attachment needs.
Although the brain is programmed to attach, the child's brain is not programmed by nature to attach only to mom and dad.
It would be very nice if it was, except life would not be possible, because mom and dad may die or disappear.
And not only that, as we get older, our attachments have to be transferable.
We have to form new attachments.
So we are programmed to attach, but not to anybody in particular.
As long as the culture took care that the attachment village of uncles, aunts, neighbors, elders were all present, Then the parents could either screw up or disappear.
That child will still be okay.
But in our culture, that's no longer the case.
And children are still programmed to attach.
And just like a duckling that will imprint on whatever moves when it is born, preferably on mother duck, but it will imprint on a toy or a horse that mother duck is not there.
And the same as the human child being will connect whoever's around.
And in our culture, who's around for our kids is from very early and joining other kids.
And so instinctually and biologically, Our kids get programmed to now attach to other kids, look to them for emotional connection, and that also means they look to them for modeling and cue-giving and how to be and how to walk and how to talk and what's important and what's valuable and what's irrelevant and what matters.
When children become each other's models and kind of cue-givers, it's developmentally, as you can imagine, a disaster because immature creatures were never meant to raise each other to maturity.
They cannot do it, and not only that, When children are attached to one another, they instinctively push away from the adults.
Now you have this terrible generation gap in every family in North America, except those families that still know how to connect with their kids.
Most people take their attachment to the issue for granted.
They think that because the child is mine, therefore he'll heed my demands and pay attention to my values.
That's not true. Children pay attention to where they're attached.
Once they put their attention on the peer group, they're attached to the peer group, That's where they're going to get their influences from, which again, developmentally, is a complete catastrophe.
Right, and of course, within the peer group, you get, rather than the long-term wisdom of the elders, you get more short-term things like status in terms of clothes or other kinds of consumerism, sports, who's good-looking and who's not, and that sort of shallows out the culture as a whole if those values are maintained into adulthood, which they often are. The degradation...
I mean, TV has never been a beacon of cultural enlightenment, as far as I'm concerned, but the change is shocking.
If you look at the banality and venality and hyper-trophied sexuality and emotional immaturity of many TV programs now, the exploitation of the vulnerable in the so-called reality shows, It's a sign of a highly immature culture.
In other words, the kind of culture that 11 or 12 years might develop.
Right. It's an elevation almost of sociopathy that we haven't seen since the veneration of the saints in the Middle Ages.
Yes, absolutely. Now, I would just like to give you the platform, if you could, because you work with a lot of dark material and I really do applaud your courage and stamina in dealing with this material and bringing it out there.
I know that, I mean, I deal with some fairly dark stuff as well, and I try to remind myself that it's important to put out a positive vision as well.
So I was wondering if you could spend a minute or two to talk about if I give you the magic wand of infinite resources, the kind of world that you see coming into being when the deficiencies in child raising and even prenatal care are, let's just say, magically done away with.
What is the world that we're building the ladder to see?
What is the view from the top of the mountain that you would like for people to see to give them the strength to continue the climb?
Well, the good news is that people are deeply hurt, but they're not damaged.
Nobody is. But underneath it all, we do have a core that's always whole and is always connected to the truth, whether we know that or not.
And so even people who have been badly traumatized can be helped if the conditions are right.
So, if I could create these conditions, first of all, I would make sure that pregnant women at the first prenatal visit have It's a good inquiry about what stresses they're facing and they receive all kinds of help and support.
Young families are given help and support.
We would stop developing this culture of disconnection instead of these large corporate soulless emporiums where people do their shopping.
They're shopping their neighbors again.
Neighbors would get to know one another.
Children would feel safe with more adults than just their parents because the community was recreated.
Parents would have time to spend with their kids and that would be their priority.
These would be the preventive measures.
By the way, I'm not being utopian here.
A lot of this stuff could be done, even in the context of our present society, if we're conscious of it.
The problem is just a lack of consciousness.
It's not that we can't do this stuff.
When it comes to people that are troubled, Whether they have mental illness or for that matter physical illness or addiction, you would see these not as curses that came out of nowhere but as the products of a life in a certain environment and it would help people heal.
You do that by giving them compassionate support, insight, understanding and you would not punish shame or stigmatize people for Whatever so-called choices, which are not choices at all, that they've made in their lives. And you certainly wouldn't punish them.
So, both scientifically and from the point of view of human insight or spiritual knowledge or just basic intuitive compassion, we know exactly what we have to do.
We just are not up to it because so much of the culture is in denial.
Right. And we would end up with, I think, a world where criminality would all but vanish except in the cases of people who are truly suffering from dissociative psychosis or something.
We would have virtually no war.
I mean, the amount of beauty that could come pouring forth from these kinds of repaired connections and benevolent parenting, to me, is such a goal that it is worth almost any price that we bear to get there.
But, you know, even when it comes to psychosis, if you actually look at that, a lot of research shows that Although there are certain genetic predispositions, but early stress still has a lot to do with it.
In an ideal world, we could prevent a lot of things that now are taken for granted as a necessary part of the human condition.
That is an excellent correction.
I've also recently learned that schizophrenia falls under the same category as well, which was quite mind-blowing to me.
What did you just say? I'm sorry, I missed you.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just saying that in conversations I've had with experts in the field recently, I've also found that something which I assumed or had a genetic biological basis, schizophrenia, is also falling into the same category that it responded to.
Yes, and you know what? I'd be very grateful if you could send me some references to that because I've looked at the phone and I've researched myself, but I would love to see more.
I will absolutely send you those.
And listen, I would really like to make sure that people get a hold of your website.
It's drgabormate.com.
Is that Dr. Gabor Matei?
That's correct, yeah. And from there, they can get a hold of your books.
And I also would highly recommend, if anybody can see Dr.
Matej's lectures on YouTube or other video sites, it is, you know, turn down the lights, put down the popcorn and just absorb because I think the information you put out is truly revolutionary and it is a fantastically exciting time to be involved even as I am peripherally and as an amateur in the propagation of this science because it is really revolutionizing, I think, what it means to look at a human identity.
Well, I appreciate that and on my website there's a page of media links where people can actually have access to A whole bunch of interviews and lectures and so on that are available on the web.
I don't sell the books personally but you can link to Amazon.ca in Canada or Amazon.com in the States or even in the States you can go to Amazon.ca if you can't get them at Amazon.com.
And I very much appreciate your interest in my work.
Thanks a lot. And thank you so much for the time and thank you so much for the work that you're doing to get this information out there.
This is, I believe, how we build a better future.
And I really appreciate your efforts in this area.
All right. Take care. Thank you.
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