The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Moment 210: Dr. Gabor Maté: Your Trauma Is Secretly Controlling You! (Until You Try This)
Fri, 25 Apr 2025
What if your anxiety, people-pleasing, or need to prove yourself isn’t a flaw… but a wound? Dr. Gabor Maté explains that trauma isn’t just about abuse or neglect - it’s the psychological injuries we carry from not getting our emotional needs met as children. This moment explores how those hidden wounds silently shape our adult lives - and how to finally begin healing them. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/3TMeC0BjPSb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/lnb9VOJjPSb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Dr. Gabor Maté: https://drgabormate.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How Does Dr. Gabor Maté Define Trauma?
Speaking about our early experiences, the first word in the sort of subtitle of your book is the word trauma. It's a word that I've, I've talked about a lot on this podcast. And I've, you know, I've had a lot of people here that have opened up about their traumas. How do you define trauma? I know society has defined it in its own way. But how do you define it?
The word? I define it very specifically. It's not something bad that happens to you. It's not that, you know, I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized. No, you weren't. You were just sad or you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized. Trauma means a wound. That's the literal meaning of the word. It's a Greek word for wounding.
So trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain. And it behaves like a wound. So on the one hand, a wound, if it's very raw, if you touch it, it just really hurts. So if I have a wound around not being wanted, or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound.
In one sense trauma is an unhealed wound that touched we get triggered. That's what triggering means by the way. Some old wound gets activated or touched. And the other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over. And scar tissue has certain characteristics. It's thick. It has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling in it. So people traumatized, disconnected from their feelings.
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 ways. dysfunctional ways because of the rigidity and scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh. So people who 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.
And I was trying to figure out how many people as a percentage of the population have trauma. But then I read this stat that 60% of adults say that they've had sort of a traumatic early upbringing or whatever or traumatic events from their childhood. But then I thought maybe everybody has trauma.
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 a meditation teacher and a psychologist and an artist actually.
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Chapter 2: What Are the Psychological Effects of Trauma Wounds?
We're also creatures with emotional needs as important as our physical needs. So when the child's emotional needs are not met, that child is wounded.
And that's what we call small T trauma, which is not the big ticket events, such as I described, but just the child's need to be loved unconditionally, to be held when distressed, to be responded to, to be seen, to be heard, to be allowed their full range of emotion without them being hurt,
stamped on in the name of so-called discipline um the right to play creatively spontaneously out there in nature not with these damn digital the gadgets that subvert and hijack the child's imagination but spontaneous play that's essential for brain development
So what I'm saying is that when these needs are not for the unconditional loving attachment relationship, when those needs are frustrated, children are also hurt. And I call that trauma as well because it shows up later in life as the impact of painful wounds. So trauma in this society, for all kinds of reasons, is far more common than we imagine.
From sitting here and speaking to, I don't know, somewhere over a hundred different people that come from all walks of life, but specifically people that are successful in their industries. And you talked about, you know, how an anomalous early upbringing can create sort of abnormality in an adult.
A lot of the people I sit here are successful because of some kind of abnormality or at least their interpretation of some kind of early event that caused them to have some sort of abnormal belief about themselves that they're not enough. So they become a billionaire or a gold medalist or whatever it might be.
One of the things that I thought I could predict is I thought I could, if they told me, I thought after doing a hundred episodes, if they told me the traumatic event they'd been through, I could predict the outcome in them. But there's a disconnect there because, you know, I'd sit here with a guest who went through one of your capital T traumas, like domestic violence.
Yeah.
And one of them might become incredibly angry.
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