Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Resilient Mind Podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Your Body Remembers Everything with Dr. Garbhamati. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Speaking about our early experiences, the first word in this 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. I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized.
Chapter 2: What does Dr. Gabor Maté mean by trauma?
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 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.
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 a 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 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.
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Chapter 3: How does trauma affect our physical and mental health?
in the name of so-called discipline, the right to play creatively, spontaneously, out there in nature, not with these damn digital 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. And one of them might become the most peaceful, loving person I've ever met. And that taught me that there's this thing in between the event, which is what you call interpretation. And I found that as, that kind of makes it really difficult to diagnose.
Well, now look, so the two examples you gave, that really peaceful person may be really peaceful for genuinely good reasons, such as they found the milk of human love flowing through their veins and they've had some spiritual reconciliation with the world, or they may have genuinely learned compassion for themselves and others.
But they could also be very nice and peaceful because they're suppressing their healthy anger. Because they're actually sitting on their rage unconsciously. Which is going to show up in the form of some kind of health manifestation I guarantee you later on. So you can't tell from the outside without asking some questions. Or I can give you the example of a Donald Trump.
who had a really traumatic childhood. I mean, his father was, as described by his psychologist niece, Mary Trump, Trump's father, who is Mary's grandfather, was a psychopath. and who really demeaned and harshly treated their children. So Trump decides unconsciously that... By the way, I'm not talking about his policies here. This is not a political debate.
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Chapter 4: What is the difference between big T and small t trauma?
And these survival mechanisms then get to form our personalities. And again, in this world, sometimes they pay off in certain ways.
Is that often the case with pathological liars? They've learned to lie as a way to survive.
Oh, absolutely. The German philosopher, writer Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche said, people lie their way out of reality who have been hurt by reality. And so I've lied. You know, like when I had my shopping addiction, I lied every day to my wife. And even afterwards, when she stopped trying to change my behavior, I said, just tell me.
If you're going to shop, you're going to spend another thousand dollars on music. Just tell me. I still couldn't. Because I was so ashamed of it. And so the lying became like a way of survival for me.
Defense against reality.
It's a defense against reality and it's a defense against being judged. Well, that says something about my childhood. Nobody's born a liar. As we say in this book, there are congenial liars, but there are no congenital liars. No one day old baby tells any lies. No one day old baby pretends anything.
If we end up pretending in any way at all to the extent that we do, it's because we had to learn that's what we must do to survive.
You said something at the start when I gave the example that I have this... I sat with a guest here who went through domestic abuse and they are the calmest person. And then you said, well, maybe they're suppressing it. And in fact... The minute you said that, it reminded me of something they said, which is they said to me on this podcast that they had angry outbursts all the time.
So sometimes their child will come up to them and want to play when they're working and they'll snap. And they're trying to deal with that.
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Chapter 5: How do childhood experiences shape our adult behavior?
So our attachment needs are enormous, and they remain important throughout lifetime because we have to have attachments to form societies, social groups without which we don't survive. So attachment is a huge need. We have to connect. belong, be loved by, and love. That's just a basic human need. But we have another need as well, which is for authenticity.
Authenticity is the capacity, as I said earlier, to know what we feel, to be in touch with our bodies, and to be able to express who we are and manifest who we are in our activities and in our relationships. Now, why is that? Well, think of a human being in the evolutionary period who's not in touch with their body and their gut feelings. How long do they survive out there in the wild?
So authenticity is another huge survival need. Great. So far, so good. But what happens to a child where the attachment need is not compatible with the need for authenticity? In other words, if I'm authentic, my parents will reject me. If I feel what I feel and express what I feel and insist on my own truth, my parents can't handle it.
And parents convey those messages unconsciously all the time. Not because they mean to, not because they don't love the child, not because they're not trying to do their best, but because they themselves are suppressed or traumatized or hurt or stressed. So I convey that message many times to my children, believe me, without any conscious desire to do so.
In fact, it was the very opposite of what I wished to convey. but that they're not acceptable the way they are with their emotions the way they are, that's the message my kids got when they were small. And most children get that in our society. And what does the child do with that? Well, if I give up my attachment for the sake of authenticity, I lose my relationships on which my life depends.
Therefore, there's no question. What becomes suppressed is our authenticity, our emotions. And then we become 25 and 30 or 35, 40, and we don't know who we are. And somebody asks us, what do you feel? You say, I have no idea. And how many times we've all had the experience of having an inkling of a strong gut feeling, but we're ignoring it. We're ignoring it and we get into trouble.
Well, that tells us what happened. What happened was that at some point we found out it was too costly for our attachment relationships to be in touch with our gut feelings. So then it becomes our first, not our first nature, but our second nature to suppress our feelings, to lose touch with ourselves and to suppress our gut feelings.
And then we pay the cost later on in the form of addictions, mental illness, or any range of physical illnesses. But it all began with this tragic conflict that children should never be confronted with, but are all the time, between authenticity on the one hand and attachment on the other.
And even as adults, so many people are suffering because they want to be themselves, but they're afraid to be because they know, or at least they fear that if they're themselves, they're going to lose important attachments.
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