Gabor Maté

I've got to learn something here.

And they do.

Now, again, I'm not romanticizing illness.

I don't wish it on anybody.

But I can quote you, for example, the American singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow, who had breast cancer.

And she said, until I had this breast cancer, I tried to please everybody else.

Voices in my head told me that everything I did was wrong.

I've silenced those voices.

Now I look after my own needs.

In other words, she's learned from her illness.

One more time, I don't romanticize illness nor recommend it, but when people are able to learn its lessons, they can actually heal very often.

Conditions that doctors told them can't be healed.

Well, people say that, but only if they misunderstand what I'm saying, because I don't blame anybody, because nobody did it deliberately.

Again, I'm talking about childhood programming.

Now, how can I blame somebody if their father was an alcoholic?

And in that home where their father's an alcoholic, their mother was stressed.

So the child survives by not rocking the boat, by walking on eggshells, by suppressing their own emotions, by, in fact, looking after the emotions of the parents, and they're programmed that way.

And the problem with these childhood adaptations is once they get ingrained,

then they persist until we deal with them.

Now, do I blame somebody for having grown up in an alcoholic home?