Dr. Gabor Maté

You might call it a disease, but actually that's a shallow way of looking at it.

Because actually, what does it go back to?

It goes back to being a one-year-old infant or being a three-month-old infant.

In the book, The Myth of Normal, the first chapter has a painting in it.

The painting is by my wife, based on a photograph of me and my mother.

This is Budapest, Hungary, 1944, and I'm three months of age.

And my mother in the photograph is wearing the yellow star the Jews had to wear.

My father was away in forced labor, and within two months, her parents would be killed in Auschwitz.

That was my first year of life.

And the look on my face is full of terror.

I was absorbing my mother's fear and my mother's anxiety.

There's no calm there.

But she's already so stressed and she's just trying to make sure that we survive.

She's not there to really receive my feelings.

And then when I'm a year old or 11 months old, she hands me to a complete stranger in the street to save my life because she didn't think where we're staying, I would survive for a day and probably I wouldn't have.

Wow.

So I didn't see her for six weeks, five or six weeks.

And you're one?

I was one then.

Oh my gosh.