Dr. Gabor Maté

For one thing, if you just, just the words that you just used, peace and love and connection, if you had played that to your 20-year-old self, how would he have responded?

So that's one of the factors is the conditioning in this culture.

I also say it would have come from intense fear.

Because if you'd actually, it's very fearful to look at all that pain inside oneself.

Yeah, it's terrifying.

So there's intense fear.

So there's the conditioning, as you say, then there's the fear.

It really is painful.

Nobody wants to have pain, but that's called growing pains.

And the third factor is we all develop this personality.

No, the personality, we think that's us, but it's not us.

Right.

The personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods, along with some genuine traits.

So the personality is kind of an amalgam of childhood coping mechanisms and genuine qualities.

Or you talk about the various masks, the sexual mask or the... Material mask.

The aggressive mask, you know.

When I started reading your chapter on the sexual mask, you wrote about some guy whose name I forget, but who's sort of the champion...

picking up women, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes for one split second.

But what's that?

It's having to prove to himself that he's lovable.