The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Gabor Maté

In Your Mind
– It all goes down in your mind
– Whether you’re going to hell, or you’re on your way to Heaven, it all happens up here
– If we’re victims of the world, we can change the world or empower ourselves
– And that’s what healing is all about

Dr. Gabor Maté: Now, this is a recording studio sometimes?

They do recordings, they do -.

Gabor Maté: Ultimately, gut feelings are still the best response

We have to connect and attach because, otherwise, we cannot survive. If there’s nobody that’s motivated to take care of us, to attach to us that way, we just can’t survive.

• Authenticity is a survival need
• But what happens if your authenticity threatens your attachment relationships?
• Just how long do you survive in the wild, if you’re not connected to your gut feelings?

Dr. Gabor Maté: It’s a great pleasure to speak with you. Tim Ferriss: And thank you for taking the time today as well.

You mentioned how we all begin loving and wanting to be loved or needing love. And then, something happens, and it’s a hard road back. And it is possible to find your way back.

• And to everybody listening and watching, also visit the show notes.

Two things she found helpful:

Decreasing her caffeine intake, which she found was almost like turning up the volume on static, making it difficult for her to read or feel other things.

• A video by Gavin de Becker called “The Gift of Fear,” which points to the benefits of some of these reactions or emotional states that we are prone to labeling negative.

Gabor Maté: Absolutely.. Tim Ferriss: And if you think about that reframe and how to view something that perhaps, historically, you would respond to as a problem or an annoyance or offensive to view that – and there are certain times when you have to fight and stand up for yourself.

I think that, in my case, and in the cases of many folks, we fight too often. We wear ourselves out.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.

Genes are more or less affected by the environment

• Even if you find a gene that predisposes someone to addiction, if that animal or if that human being is brought up in good, nurturing circumstances, their risk of addiction is no greater than creatures without that gene

What does it mean to perform?

A lot of people who perform well are actually deeply troubled inside

• Sensitivity magnifies the pain that we have
• The most creative people also have the most pain which is why so many creative people escape from their pain through all kinds of dysfunctions like addictions
• There’s a really link between creativity and sensitivity
• Dr. Gabor Maté: Sensitivity also leads to more creativity
• And even from themselves, they hid their own suffering

Ayahuasca is more like an old fashioned. There are few ingredients that are almost always there.

The plant is made orally active through the MAO inhibitors, monoaminoxidase inhibitors in the vine, and the leaves of chacruna fall into it, making it even more powerful.

The first time in your life that you felt hurt and angry, when you perceived somebody didn’t care about you or didn’t respect you, or has it happened before?

Trauma is what trauma is. We respond to our perception of what happens

• Of all of the possible interpretations, we choose the worst one
• We don’t respond to the present moment, but rather the past
• Now, but along the lines of our discussion, it’s a beautiful learning opportunity

How we see the world determines the world we live in

Don Quixote: deluded, Spanish nobleman who wants to revive the age of chivalry and knighthood

• He thinks windmills are giants, and he attacks them
• And he keeps getting hurt because he doesn’t see reality
• His heart is purely committed to liberating people, to truth, to justice, to fighting oppressors, to liberating the oppressed
• The Dhammapada: the Buddhist collection of sayings
• We create the world with our minds
• Everything is thought in the lead
• Before, with our mind, we create our world, the world creates our minds

Dr. Gabor Maté: Okay. So, let’s notice something. A) You, I should say we, because we’re all like this, we don’t respond to what happens. We respond to our perception of what happens

It’s with our minds we create the world.

Dr. Gabor Maté: I’ve had some involvement with psilocybin studies.

Hefter Institute

• USONA
• MAPS
• The psychedelic component, which Bill Wilson, one of the founders of AA, actually had some powerful LSD experiences, which helped him in his spiritual growth
• These are all tools in the toolkit that people can use for their own sort of bespoke approach.

My next book is on mind, body, unity, and health and illness

When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection

• Opioid addiction is a response to childhood loss, stress, trauma, and how to address that
• The most common cause of death under the age of 50 in the US is now overdose
• We have this response to addiction which deals with the effects, the behaviors, controlling the manifestations, and not the causative factors
  Closing words
• We never even talked about the multigenerational nature of trauma, what it is. We pass this on from one generation to the next, not because we intend to but because we can’t help it.
• It’s a social issue. It needs to be looked at in deep over the generations and broadly as the function of a whole society.

Obesity itself is a response to childhood trauma

The obesity epidemic right now is not just an epidemic of junk foods and sedentary lifestyles. There are contributing factors, of course.

• But the underlying basis is people self soothing their stresses in their lives
• An epidemic of stress
• People are stuffing down their pain, anger, rage responses, stimulants, etc. This is all based on childhood trauma.

Tim Ferriss: But I did interrupt you. You were about to mention another technique or modality that can help.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Well, about 10 years ago, I began to work with psychedelics. And I’ve been doing work with them now for 10 years. And they’re another potent method. But they require adept practitioners with deep integrity and deep knowledge and experience.

Background

Gabor Maté was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944, two months before the Germans occupied the country.

• His parents didn’t say much about their history, and he knew very little about the details of the Holocaust until he read a book by a British civil servant and member of the House of Lords, and saw photographs of the horrors of the concentration camps and the extermination details.

Palliative Care

Help people with the transition with terminal illness from life to death

• You have to develop patience and a lot of patience
• Work with people with multiple different attitudes towards life and death, religious, nonreligious, spiritual, nonspiritual, in denial, in acceptance, and all of those stages in between
• It’s deeply meaningful and deeply transformative work

Powerful healers exploit people sexually and financially

This is not just restricted to the psychedelic world. It also happens in the spiritual world.

• When you have that much power, and you haven’t done your integration work, you can start misusing that power.

Ayahuasca is a medicinal plant that has been used in the Amazon Basin for hundreds of years in its cultural context

In the right setting, with the right leadership, these have proven to be very powerful modalities of healing.

• People don’t come to it cold, they come into it with preparation in a safe setting where, pretty soon, a group becomes a family to each other.

Addiction is a disease of the brain, with disordered brain circuits and behaviors and an accurate yet narrow perspective

The mainstream view is that addiction is a matter of individual choice, moral failure, or weakness, which is why so many approaches are based on deterrents and punishment

• Not why the addiction but why the pain.
• If we understand that addiction, in every case, is rooted in some painful, internal experience, when you ask people what does the addiction do for them, they will say it numbs them, it soothes the pain, it gives them a sense of control, and gives them inner peace.

Two Reframes

Rather than asking why the addiction, ask why the pain.

• Instead of looking at the consequences, look at the causes and not confusing the symptoms with the causes.
• Compassion for Addiction is an organization founded by Dr. Gabor Maté and Vicky Sarlow that focuses on helping people with addiction.

Do you practice yoga, and if so, what type do you practice?

With his ADHD, Gabor Maté couldn’t do yoga, until a year and a half ago, when he met an Indian yogi.

• He developed a method called Somatic Experience, which bypassed the conscious mind and got to the emotional brain quicker than talk therapy
• The essence of yoga is to regain unity, not just with ourselves but also with the larger creation
• Yoga, when practiced in its intended way, is about intentional yoga with a meditative aspect
• There are many forms of yoga that other people more knowledgeable than he are able to recommend, including inner engineering

Ayahuasca works through you

It manifests what’s in you, so your intention is more specific to you where you are in life, at that moment, the more effective it is going to be

• The shamans work with you during the ceremony, and they chant to you based on what they’re picking up from you

The task which hinders your task is your task

It seems very common in any group, especially larger groups, and this is true in psychedelics or at Vipassana retreats.

• Instead of watching your own reactions, you should learn to watch your own reaction.

Tim Ferriss: If you go in, and you have an expectation you can’t let go of, you end up – many people end up trying to white knuckle the experience.

Dr. Gabor Maté

• And that’s true in general life, and it’s very true for plant experiences

Tim Ferriss: So, this ties into exactly where I was going, which is related to your pre and post work with psychedelics.

The vast majority of psychedelic use is very irresponsible

• It can certainly cause a good amount of harm if not done in a supervised, safe fashion
• This applies specifically to psychedelics and, even specifically to ayahuasca if that is the primary compound

Dr. Gabor Maté: “I closed my heart against love precisely because, when I was vulnerable and small, I’d be so hurt going through my mother’s states of mind. She couldn’t respond to me when I needed to be responded to.”

So, I just got this experience of love as something profound and universal and life defining. But something from my life has just been cut off in so many ways.

The very essence of trauma is the loss of that connection to yourself.

When you lose connection to your gut feelings, then, you are vulnerable to being exploited by those who seek healing.

• The very portal into healing, which is opening up the vulnerability that we’ve shut down against, is also the portal for potential loss.

Adverse childhood experience studies:

14,000+ adults, mostly Caucasians, half of them university educated, looked at the relationship between childhood adversity and adult outcomes.

• An adverse childhood experience was defined as physical or sexual or emotional abuse, a divorce, a parent being jailed, violence in the family, etc..
• For each of these adverse childhood experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially.

Integration means keeping in touch with people that can help you stay on track

If you can talk to somebody regularly over time, and if you can maintain your contact with the group sort of like a Facebook group where people share experiences, if you take on certain practices, and you do them together, and then, you share about the practices

What visions came to you?

Whatever experience you have, that’s the experience you need to have. It’s your specific experience, what does it mean in your life.

• The purpose of the processing is to help you find the teaching that was imparted to you by whatever experience you had, not about comparing your experience to the night before or two nights before or to the experience of other people.

Why do you resist your own giftedness?

Sensitive – the word sensitive comes from the Latin word sense or to feel.

• The sensitive person feels more, feels more intensely, and has a more perceptive understanding of the world around them, which is why they are able to resist their own gifts.

A number of things I’d really like to underscore because you mentioned them, and I’d like to reiterate their importance and how they transcend the plant medicine work, the psychedelics.

The first is how you mentioned intentions

Dr. Gabor Maté: Well, can I, again, give you a quote?.

“Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard, they’re actually yours. They’re specifically yours designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. You’re not going to go in the right direction, unless there’s something pricking you in the side telling you look here, this way.”

• We can look at all of these things as problems to get rid of, which is what the personality wants to do, or we can view them as learning opportunities, or even as obstacles to your true self’s progress.

Dr. Gabor Maté: The reason I ask is because he’s got a song that I play at all of my events.

Dr. Gabor Maté: I’m great. I’m doing very well. I think I’m the sanest and, arguably, in the best place I’ve been maybe ever. So, I feel very good.

• Which means that healing is just available.

With ayahuasca specifically, there’s a physician preparation that includes no caffeine, no red meat, cutting down on salt, excluding dairy products, and physical preparation to cleanse the body and make it more receptive

From the emotional and psychological point of view, you want somebody to really form an intention

• What actually do I want out of this experience because intention is everything
• So, intention setting and really considering what is my purpose in undertaking this experience?

Dr. Gabor Maté: As a medical doctor, why people suffer and why people make other people suffer has been a motivating question in his life.

Winnie the Pooh, The Dhammapada, The Drama of the Gifted Child, and Don Quixote are some examples of books that he has read often and has been motivated by this question of what makes people be the way they are, and why they suffer.

He is also a co-founder of Compassion for Addiction, an organization that advocates for a new way to understand and treat addiction

• Even though you might not consider yourself an addict, there are shared similarities and shared treatments

Dr. Gabor Maté: ADHD is a response to family, multigenerational, and social stress, in sensitive children.

It is transformable because that true self that you got disconnected from is still available to you. It’s a question of how do we reconnect to ourselves?

• The less connected people are, and the more stress there is, the more pressure there is on sensitive kids.

The Drama of the Gifted Child

Written by Alice Miller

• “The more sensitive the child, the more he or she feels the pain and stress of the environment and the more affected they are”
• Helps liberate people from the “prison that childhood often imposes on so many of us.”

The following is a transcript of an interview with Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology.

He is also a co-founder of Compassion for Addiction, an organization that advocates for a new way to understand and treat addiction

• Even though you might not consider yourself an addict, there are shared similarities and shared treatments

Dr. Gabor Maté: A study last year showed that American black women, the more experience with racism they have, the greater the risk of asthma.

What do we give people to control their asthma?

• Inhalers that contain adrenaline and cortisol, which are stress hormones
• Asthma has everything to do with stress

ADD is an inherited disease.

If the mother is suffering, the baby suffers, too. If I were to become abusive towards you right now, verbally or otherwise, what would be your options right now?

• I could ignore.. Dr. Gabor Maté: But that’s not what you would do first, is it?.
• I would probably just listen and pause.

Tim Ferriss: How are you doing so far?

Dr. Gabor Maté: I’m great. I’m doing very well. I think I’m the sanest and, arguably, in the best place I’ve been maybe ever. So, I feel very good.

• Which means that healing is just available.

If you see that you’re the source, now, you’re powerful

Reframe things, and you actually see the source within ourselves, all of a sudden, that’s liberating

• Every time you’re pointing a finger at someone, keep in mind that there are three fingers pointing back at you

Dr. Gabor Maté: It’s who prepares it, how much they bowl it for, what combination, what intention and so on.

Most of the time, it’s pretty much the same preparation regardless of the person making the drink or the location.

Whatever you’re dealing with, you have to look at not just the individual internal environment, but also the broader social and cultural environment of which you’re one particular manifestation.

We need to change the conversation around these issues, particularly, around addiction from a blaming and shaming and ostracizing and just medical model perspective to one that takes into account trauma and social issues and brings compassion into it.

2012:

Harvard Center on the Developing Child

• Growing scientific evidence that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, or instability can lead to short term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, or which may come at a significant cost to long term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity
• The architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood, and establishes either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all the health learning and behavior that follow
• When parents are stressed or distracted or workaholics like I was a young parent, if there is instability, economic troubles, relationship troubles, unresolved trauma on the part of the parent, loving parents who are just stressed that will interfere with the child’s brain development

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Tribe of Mentors is a book by Jon H. Konik that offers short, tactical life advice from 100+ world-class performers.

• Many of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, athletes, investors, poker players, and artists are part of the book including Jimmy Fallon, Arianna Huffington, Brandon Stanton, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and more.

Tim Ferriss: And I was just going to add one thing to that, which is that is one combination.

It can also be ayahuasca vine plus [inaudible], which is a different plant, also DMT containing, but, for some people, substantially different experience.

Gabor Maté: His great niece sent me an email a few months ago to thank me for my work.

Imagine the karma she was carrying and all the healing she has had to do.

• So, there was her great uncle trying to kill me and my people. And there’s the great niece making contact with me.

Gabor Maté: Absolutely..

After going to this Tony Robbins event with a number of people, including Joe Gebia, co-founder of Airbnb, Mark Benioff, CEO of Sales Force, and many others, they kept a group text going afterwards to hold each other accountable and also to set follow up group calls and so on.

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