Dr. Gabor Maté

disconnected from their feelings um scar tissue is rigid it's not flexible so we lose kind of response flexibility so when something happens we tend to react in typical stereotypical predictable dysfunctional ways because of the rigidity and scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh so people are traumatized tend to be stuck in emotional states that characterized

their development when they were traumatized.

So when somebody says to you, don't be such a baby, it doesn't sound very pleasant, but there's some truth to it.

It means that you're probably reacting according to the lines of some wound that you sustained as an infant.

And now you're reacting as if that wound was happening all over again.

This is what one of my friends in the trauma world, Peter Levine, calls the tyranny of the past.

So something happens in the present and we react

as if we're back there in the past when this first happened.

And we're not in the present moment at all.

It depends on how we understand trauma.

So if we understand trauma, it's only the really terrible things that happen to people, which do happen to people.

You know, in the book I talked about a British friend of mine living in Canada.

They are a yoga teacher and meditation teacher.

and a psychologist and an artist actually.

And they grew up in some orphanage here in Britain where they were racially taunted every morning.

You know, words that are in the book, by her permission, which I'm not going to cite here publicly.

And that gave her a sense of deficient, a sense of self that I'm just not good enough, that I don't belong and so on.

there's those obvious traumas or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused.

So men who are sexually abused, according to a Canadian study, have triple the rate of heart attacks as adults, you know, and all kinds of physiological reasons.

Well, that should be the case.