TS: Now, one question, Gabor, I had—well, I had many questions in reading The Myth of Normal, but it had to do with this notion of coming into contact with our authentic self. You describe healing as a directionality, a process where we become more and more whole. And one of my questions is… I’ll just say it in the… Was I ever whole? I can remember pain and trauma from when I was in the womb, or so it is in my imagination at least. And I think, am I becoming whole for the first time? Or was I ever whole? I wonder how you see that.
GM: Well, first of all, if you look at two words in English language, one is “healing” itself, and the other “recovery.” So healing means wholeness. Healing comes from an Anglo-Saxon word called whole or wholeness. So healing means to become whole, number one. Number two, recovery. When people recover, especially from addictions, the word recovery itself, what does it mean? It means to find something, to find it again. Well, when I ask people who’ve healed from addiction, “What did you recover? What did you find again?”—you know what they always say? “I found myself.” Which means that self that they found never could have been destroyed or even split. I just lost contact with it. And in my view, the essence of trauma is disconnection from the self. And I don’t think I’m alone. In fact, I think I’m in rather honest company in asserting that there is an authentic self that’s got nothing to do with your life history. You can lose contact with it, but you can never destroy it, and it’s always been there. And anybody who’s ever had a deep spiritual experience, probably far beyond than what I’ve had, will tell you about this experience of the Self with the capital S that goes way beyond the little ego.
But let me ask you a more specific question, because I don’t know [inaudible 00:37:27] spiritual here what matters, that I sort of have to take other people’s words for. When you’re generous and kind to somebody, Tami, when you’re openhearted, as compared to when you’re scared or selfish or manipulative, what do you feel in your body? When you’re open, kind and generous, what’s in your body?
TS: I feel a kind of natural goodness, if you will. I feel—
GM: Natural goodness.
TS: —wholesome. Wholesome quality. Yeah, purity even.
GM: Well, you just answered my question. Wholesome means whole. There it is, the actual real self. It’s been there all along. You just have not been in touch with it. The actual goodness you said, that’s your natural state. So it is there for us. We just lose contact with it. Then that’s the essence of trauma. So when I talk about authenticity from the word auto, the self, I just mean—now, children have this essential need for healthy development. Amongst other essential needs is the need to have the freedom to experience all their emotions. And children who are allowed to experience all their emotions, they remain whole. They don’t become disconnected. And that means their natural goodness will be present for them. So you kind of answered your question in your own words. Natural goodness, you said, wholesomeness. That’s your true self, I would argue. And I think you know that. I think we all know that on some level.
TS: Now, Gabor, in The Myth of Normal, you write about how you had a profound breakthrough yourself not that long ago in a series of ayahuasca journeys that resulted in you encountering, it sounded like, some kind of deep taste, touch of your “true self.” And quite honestly, I understood the circumstances, and you can share that here with our audience, but I didn’t quite get a clear picture of what the actual experience was that was the breakthrough for you. So I wonder if you can share both the context, the experience, and what level of transformational change really came from it?
GM: The context was a retreat that I was going to lead in the Amazon jungle at a particular ayahuasca facility called The Temple of the Way of Light. And professional physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors came from all over the world to work under the leadership of the well-known Dr. Gabor Maté. And they came from four continents, 23 of them. And I’d worked with ayahuasca for over a decade by then, and I helped people formulate their intentions for the ceremony. And after the ceremony, which I don’t lead—that’s led by shamans [inaudible 00:40:48]… I help people integrate their experience, understand their experience, interpret it. And I’m good at doing that. And so people came, paid big bucks. They come from all over the world to the Amazon jungle, and the shamans, after one ceremony, they came to me and said, “You can’t take part here because you’re too dense. There’s something dark about you that interferes with our chanting, that doesn’t let our medicine penetrate into you. And your darkness even affects the other people.” So essentially, they fired me from my own retreat. And the rest of the ceremonies were done without me.
And they assigned one shaman to work with me privately in five ceremonies over the next ten days. So it was both a humbling and a liberating experience, because I arrived there very stressed, overworked, and they were quite right. But furthermore, Tami, they said, “We sense two things about you.” And you have to understand they didn’t know who I was, what I’d done, who I am in the world, my achievements, nothing. They just saw me as the person who was in front of them at that time. And they said, “There’s two things about you that we sense. One is that we think you worked with a lot of trauma in your life and you haven’t cleared that out of yourself. And secondly, we think when you were very small, you had a big scare early in your life and you haven’t got over it yet.” So that’s the context.
TS: Okay. And then what happened?
GM: So then the shaman worked with me for five ceremonies. I took the ayahuasca. He chanted. He prayed over me. He put his hands on. He did an energetic work, and gradually I loosed, and I became calmer, more present, more grounded, more grateful. And when the final ceremony was over, at least, so I was, and I was feeling very clear and very grateful and glad for the experience and appreciating both the wisdom of the shamans and appreciating also my own willingness to get fired and to receive their healing. I thought it was finished, and all of a sudden I was thrown on a mat by some force. And then for the next two hours or more, I just journeyed. And this is where I have no words, because I don’t remember much of the journey, except that I was gone far away. And I remember the vision at the end of it, that I shared in the book where the Hungarian word—now, I don’t think in Hungarian and I don’t dream in Hungarian. So this came from very deep within me.
And in a blue-like sky in letters like [inaudible 00:43:41] of cloud, the Hungarian word, B-O-L-D-O-G, boldog, were spelled out. And I saw it in my eyes, and I realized that all that stuff that had happened to me need not define my existence, that all that had happened to my family, all that happens in the world, painful, distressing, tragic, traumatizing as it all can be, it doesn’t have to define who I am or my future or my relationship to life or my relationship to myself or my relationship to anything. So a liberation from the past is what it was. But that’s the closest as I can come to describing it, because it would take a better poet than I am to give it words. And some of the great poets and spiritual teachers can find the right words. By the way, I’m not comparing my experience to others. I’m just saying that I don’t have the words to say much more about it besides what I’ve just shared, or share in the book, except to say I wouldn’t want anybody to believe that I had that experience and I came back a changed man. I mean, I did have a glimpse of something, I had an opening to something, but believe me, two months later, or a week after I got home from that trip, I started writing a book, and I plunged right into despair.
So it was and it remains an essential experience for me, but again, we have to emphasize the importance of integration and constant reintegration of those experiences into our lives. And I think the same is true for any spiritual experience, with or without psychedelics.
TS: And the Hungarian word that you saw spelled in the sky means?
GM: Happy. It means happy.
TS: There you go.
GM: Which is not a word that easily came to my mind when I ever thought about myself.
TS: No, probably not the first word most people would use, either, for you. But there you go, a gift to you, happy in Hungarian. Now, as someone who knows a lot about neurology and what’s happening in our hormonal system, what was going on during these ayahuasca ceremonies in terms of creating this kind of access? And I’m particularly interested, Gabor, because most of us won’t go to South America and spend X number of thousands of dollars and have experiences like this. But how can we understand the template, if you will, of the human journey so that we can access this wisdom?
GM: Well, out of 33 chapters in the book, precisely one is on psychedelic modality, because the last thing I want to come across as is some kind of psychedelic evangelist. I don’t think they are the answer. And I don’t overemphasize—I mean, out of the eight healing chapters in the book, one is on psychedelics. So I think there’s much more to it than that. But specifically, when it comes to psychedelics, there’s no magic about it. There’s no miracle about it. I describe the experience of a woman with severe life-threatening, in fact, terminal autoimmune disease who, based on her experience with psychedelics, literally she should have been dead years ago, according to the prognosis and her physical state prior to psychedelics. But the psychedelics opened for her a whole healing process that has her active and vital and creative right now, years later.
And from the point of view of Western medicine, or at least not Western science, but Western medical practice, that’s unexplainable. But there’s nothing unexplainable when we understand the science. So I said earlier that mind and body can’t be separated, and physiology is related to psychology. And so Freud said at one point that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, which means that when you’re dreaming, your unconscious just shows up, which is what happens. Because what happens in dream state is that the conscious brain is offline, and the parts of the brain that are charged with childhood emotional memories become diffused with blood. And so they become very active. And then the mind makes up stories to account for those emotions. So for example, if you are dreaming that Nazis are chasing you and you’re afraid, it’s not true that you’re afraid because Nazis are chasing you. It’s more true to say that Nazis are chasing you because the emotion of fear has arisen in your brain, because your control system is offline, your childhood memories are enlivened, and now the expression of fear that you suppressed as a child now comes alive, and then your mind makes up a story to explain the fear.
Much the same happens with psychedelics. So if dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, I would say psychedelics are even more of a royal road to the unconscious, for the reason that under a psychedelic experience, that membrane between conscious and unconscious disappears. The unconscious floods into your awareness in the form of visions, in the form of stories, in the form of deeply felt emotions, but you are there as an adult to witness it all and to kind of work it through in a safe environment where you’re guided by people who know what they’re doing. And this is why the importance of environment and context, the setting, is so important. And then if there’s somebody like myself around the next day, then we can talk about it, then you can actually interpret and integrate that experience even more deeply. So psychedelics [inaudible 00:49:53] that membrane and at the same time a lot of all that stuff that you’ve been suppressing to flood into your awareness.
What can also flood into your awareness, has happened with me in that very last experience with that picture in the sky that I talked about, is your authentic self can show up, which has been covered under layers of suffering and layers of defenses and adaptations and so on. So you’re in a position, ideally speaking, to both come to terms with your suffering that you’d repressed, but also with that self that you had lost contact with. So that’s kind of an idealized nutshell, summation of the psychedelic experience when it works. There’s different psychedelics, of course. You can’t put them into one basket. As ayahuasca with ibogaine, you’ll have a different experience. With an MDMA, mushrooms, you’ll have a different experience. But essentially common to them all is the lifting of the veil between the conscious and the unconscious.
TS: How do you relate now to that sort of superhero, workaholic identity that was asked to be put on hold by the shamans when they said, “Please get out of the room actually. We fire you for the week”? How do you relate though to that? Like I’m the superhero. I’m going to bring my method, Compassionate Inquiry. How do you relate to that you, the doctor, super-talented superhero?
GM: Intellectually I see through it, and I really see what a sad story it really is and how much suffering it can generate. In practice, I have to tell you, I’m sitting here today having been shocked yesterday, the day before, by to what extent I fell into the same sand trap. As a result of—I basically got myself totally identified with this book and its success and the attention of creating-
TS: [inaudible 00:52:04]. Yeah. Sure.
GM: And I lost myself. And that showed up in a very dramatic way in the last couple of days. I had to be sort of shocked back into realizing how easy it is for me to don that superhero cape and to forget who I am. So that just happened. I’m back to myself today. I’m much quicker now at doing that, but it was a shock. It really was.
TS: I can feel you. I can feel your heart. And I just have two final questions for you here. One is that you talk about how, when many of us get ill and we have a conversation with a medical professional, that conversation doesn’t get at the kinds of interior process, what we’re bringing, if you will, to whatever suffering we’re experiencing right now, whatever disease process or mental health. It doesn’t get at those issues. And I’m curious if you were able to give some suggestions to people who work in the medical profession or, if we’re getting these questions coming towards us, what questions would be helpful? What do you wish doctors would ask?
GM: I wish that my profession just got scientific about it. And I’ll tell you three diseases that are just classic. Multiple sclerosis, the guy who described it for the first time, a French neurologist called Charcot, in 1870, that this is a disease caused by stress. Rheumatoid arthritis, the great Canadian American British physician, Sir William Osler, in 1895 said this is a disease caused by stress. Breast cancer in women, a great British surgeon, in 1870, James Paget said that this is related to people’s emotions, negative emotions. Now, since those pioneers have made those observations, we’ve had literally tens of thousands of papers showing a relationship between emotions and physiology and stress, trauma, and disease. So a recent study out of Harvard, no less, four years ago, showed that women with severe PTSD have double the risk of ovarian cancer. We’ve seen lots of evidence about—a recent Danish study came out last week, the relationship of childhood trauma to adult heart disease.
I could go on forever. And yet the average physician never hears that information once, not once throughout their medical training. It’s completely ignored. It’s unbelievable the gap between the science, the evidence on one hand and, on the other hand, medical practice. And so what would I have physicians do? I’d have them find out about trauma. The average physician does not get a single lecture on trauma and its impacts on mental and physical health in all the years of education. Unbelievable. Despite all the science. So first of all, educate yourselves. Let’s educate ourselves. I’m not blaming people as individuals. Institutionally, we need to develop what George Engel called for in 1977, a biopsychosocial approach. And if that’s the case, when somebody comes to you with a flare-up of rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis or depression, don’t just medicate it. Don’t just mitigate the symptoms. Once you’ve done that, ask, “How’s your life? What happened to you? What emotional burdens are you carrying? Because there’s a lot of evidence,” we might say to our patients, “that our minds and our bodies are inseparable and our psychology very much affects our physiology. Therefore, in your healing process, let’s work on your psychology and on your relationship to yourself as much as you work on the physical aspects of your illness.”
And as a physician, I may not be trained to do that, but at least I recognize its existence, that mind-body unity. Let me send you to somebody who can talk to you about it. And then you can send them to somebody who does Dick Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems or my Compassionate Inquiry or Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing or Pat Ogden’s work or any number of modalities of treatment psychologically that take trauma and the mind-body unity into account. So that’s what I would have my colleagues do.
TS: And then a final question here, Gabor. You have a chapter in The Myth of Normal, “Before the Body Says No,” how we can tune in, if you will—this is my language—to kind of the whispers before we get the loud screaming “no” of really being flattened by something. How do we listen to the whispers?
GM: So you and I had a conversation once before about when the body says no, when people don’t know how to say no, because in childhood programming, in their childhoods, they adapted to their family’s milieu by suppressing their needs, by saying yes to other people’s expectations of them rather than their authentic selves. So eventually, the body will say no in the form of illness of mind or body. So now this chapter, as you say, is called “Before the Body Says No.” The question is, do we want to wait for illness? Do we want to wait for an autoimmune disease or a severe back problem or depression or some other manifestations of suffering to wake us up? Or do we want to learn how to say no before our body does? So there’s two things we can do here in a nutshell. I mean, the chapters are more elaborations on this theme, but a little exercise where we can keep asking ourselves: where am I not saying no, where I want to say or no, when there’s a no that wants to be said, but I’m not saying it because I’m too worried about being loved and accepted and admired? So where, this week, did I not say no? And what was the impact on me of not saying no? Usually it’s fatigue, tiredness, physical symptoms, resentment, and so on.
So there’s an exercise that guides you through working with yourself so that you recognize your patterns so that you do learn how to say no. So that’s the one aspect of it. Another aspect of it, just a daily or at least weekly, conscious little check-in. What’s my body saying? What’s going on in my body? Is there fatigue? Are there stomach aches? Is there heartburn? Are there back spasms? Are there frequent colds? Is there dry mouth? Are there aches and pains here or there? This is your body talking to you. Are there headaches? Usually, you go to a doctor with these symptoms, and it’s kind of a conspiracy, at least an unconscious one, between the patient and the physician. The patient says, “I got this symptom. Please get rid of it for me.” And the doctor says, “I will, because that’s all I know how to do, is to get rid of symptoms, but I can’t deal with the underlying process.” Well, let’s dissolve that conspiracy. So when the body’s talking to you in the form of chronic migraines or chronic headaches or fatigue, check in with yourself once a week. What’s my body saying? So that’s a two-pronged approach, which is kind of a simplistic explanation, but it’s entirely doable. And I’ll tell you, Tami, that little exercise about where I’m not saying no—a lot of people have told me that just doing that has totally changed their life.
TS: I have to be honest with you, Gabor, I feel like this is the first half of a conversation, and maybe I’m just hoping it’s the first half of a conversation about your work on The Myth of Normal, because there’s so much that we could talk about. You’ve packed—honestly, I felt like I got a huge education in one week of reading, and I would recommend the book to anyone. Dr. Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
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