Dr. Gabor Maté

It's totally unhealthy so that the addictions and the diseases and the mental illnesses that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation.

So that whatever addiction you had or even...

this mask of rigid masculinity that you try to adopt for a while until it's cracked for you.

Right, needing to win, needing to be the best.

But that was a normal response.

To survive.

To survive, exactly.

So that the abnormality wasn't in you, it was in the situation that you're in.

That's what I mean by a toxic culture.

Yeah.

I know again in your book, you talk about these public figures that all of a sudden you realize we're talking about their emotions.

But that's fairly new.

In the last like five, 10 years.

So these days, athletes will talk about their sexual abuse.

Well, I think what's happened that the toxicity of the culture, one of my subtitles is toxic culture, and it's got so bad.

There's a Greek playwright that I quote in my book.

He's Aeschylus, and one of his plays, he said that the way that God's created us, human beings, that we have to suffer, suffer into truth.

And I think that the degree of suffering, now most people I know who engage in a path of self-exploration and truth, they didn't do it because all of a sudden they just made a decision.

They just suffered so much.

So the suffering can actually wake you up.