Healing and Trauma – notes on a presentation from Gabor Maté

Disconnection with Authenticity

‘Authenticity’ comes from auto – the self/autonomous/that connection to self

You might have heard about the link between emotional stress and disease. All holistic healing systems from east to west recognise that emotions are at the root of dis-ease. I remember sitting down (at 4am as the course was in the U.K) to a lecture from my Chinese herbalism professor years ago and he spoke about emotions as the causes of all illness. Maté spoke about the role of illness as a pathway to healing, I caught so many of the things he said and tried to get them down here as quickly as I could, hopefully this is accurate enough. He talked about becoming unwell as a result of the trauma inside of us. That illness is our body trying to protect us, to wake us up and get our attention, to call us to make decisions to heal. He said “I don’t recommend illness as a form of learning….but boy is it powerful” as a call to heal. My head was nodding! 

I kind of understood this from my naturopathy education but it hadn’t really been expressed that simply. We’d learnt about the nervous system, chronic stress and the adrenals, fight or flight and emotional stress as ‘symptoms’. It was put differently. We learnt about models of stress and illness. Hans Seyle said most of the modern societal stressors are emotional, and the biggest stress of all is trying to be somebody that you’re not. Why would we do this when we’re born in a state of connection to ourselves.

Our gut feelings are important, our intuition. We can know through the mind but the gut sends more messages to the brain than the brain sends to the gut. And the chemistry we find in our brains is also found in our guts. Our gut emotions give us critical information about the outside world, we can’t lose connection to this. Why would we disconnect and not pay attention to our gut feelings then? There’s actually nothing wrong with us, all our disturbing emotions…..these are our responses to events, they’re not who we are. That disengagement from our gut feelings was fuelled by a powerful reason: the need we have as a child for attachment (the drive to connect to others)…“we’re creatures of attachment”.

We’re born dependent and needing attachment. We can’t be autonomous from the first day we’re born. In this way, we are different to other animals. And so begins that journey of attachment. Ideally children can keep their sense of self and gut feelings intact – in other words… to be authentic. As soon as there is conflict however, that authenticity is at stake.

Children don’t have the option to remain authentic when there is a conflict, without a parent to care for them they won’t survive. Something has to give. There’s something in that need to feel safe that starts to gnaw away at our sense of identity and our authenticity. Is this, I wonder, why studies are showing childhood traumas influencing so many aspects of our later lives including hormonal conditions and menopause?

He asked us: “Thinking back then on your journey through life, how free have you really been to be your authentic self? If you have to make the choice between authenticity and attachment, which one do you choose? As a child, did you often sacrifice your authenticity to choose attachment?”

Child abuse of any type leaves that child in a difficult situation. The conversation was deep, Usually in webinars as a viewer I feel quite separate, but the combination of Maté’s compassionate approach and the way the event was hosted, I felt seen. Which is weird to say about a webinar, but anyway!!…And there were a lot of sharings in the chat, there you go 🙂

The gut feeling in those times of danger would be to get away, but there’s no way for children to do that, and they may not be able to fight back. Makes my  heart break. In that helpless situation they learn the coping mechanism of disconnection or freezing.

That disconnection is a survival mechanism. Its not weakness, a mistake or a lack of courage. It’s an outcome of trauma. We want to try to regain that connection as a path to healing. 

What is the long-term impact of trauma on our lives?

Maté mentioned something that always stood out for me in his book The Myth of Normal – trauma isn’t something that happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. So he separated the traumatic event from the ‘trauma’. Trauma means ‘a wound’ literally. he explained that this is how we need to think about traumas, as wounds. Unless a wound heals it will keep hurting us and we need to heal it in the present. We can’t go back in time and change the traumatic event, but we can actively heal the trauma that currently lives in us. So trauma is the wound we’re still carrying now, (it’s not over when it happened, 20 or 30 years ago). Chronic pain in adulthood is linked to childhood trauma in many studies because trauma changes how the body relates to pain. There are emotional issues in the body that are not resolved. Trauma can lead to mental and emotional issues, our sense of self changing, our perceptions of the world, our illnesses. He said, if you ever find yourself thinking ‘what just happened, why did I respond that way?’ then you were not in the present. You were in the past with your trauma during that response.

“Trauma obliterates the distinction between the past and the present.”  

And all we ever want is to be free of the past and its control over us. He mentioned a researchers name for this approach, note to self to look that up later!

There were quite a few moments throughout the presentation when he’d say, “But the good news is..” and I appreciated that positivity. he proposed that there are ways we can recognise our trauma and not be puppeteered by it. We can heal our traumas in the present moment. Natural medicine is really good at this, and lots of herbalists will talk about the plants playing the role of teacher in our bodies. Teaching us how to function well again. Imparting to us the biochemistry and the energies that help our bodies regain full and optimal health. 

He also talked about this concept of the authentic self, and how when we are connected to our authentic self we feel a sense of expansion. This takes me back to a workshop I attended years ago which was about connecting to the heart. As a group we all shared and meditated and did various exercises in pairs, cultivating a deeper connection to our hearts. I really resonated with his words here. When I feel something is truly in alignment with who I am and the decisions I’m making, I feel an expansion within. I feel it in my heart. It’s something I use often in my life and something I teach as well in my Mastery Program for naturopaths and herbalists. My program is based on a bio-psycho-social model of the individual. Biochemistry can only explain so much….

Saying ‘No’

So we got into the territory of ‘what are some things we can do to start reclaiming that connection to our authentic selves?” And the question was asked: “How does saying ‘no’ help us mend that disconnection from our authentic self?” Maté said that nature programs us to learn how to say ‘no’ before we learn how to say ‘yes’. It’s a natural part of our journey through life as a young child. ‘Nature programs the no before it programs the yes’ and that may not be acceptable in the home so it children may have been suppressed and feel unable to say no. We shared some of our answers in the chat.

The question posed to us: “In what areas of your life do you have difficulty saying no?”

I was thinking to myself, every midlife GenX woman needs to hear this (!!!) So we all pretty much said three things: to our children, to our partners and at work.

Apparently it tends to happen more within our family and intimate relationships. Our task: Sit down and write down the times that week when you wanted to say no but you said yes. Don’t judge or criticise yourself. Just be a neutral observer to yourself. Again, hard work for a GenX woman…but so important to hear!

Then we were asked about how we were impacted? And Maté said there are several ways we’re impacted by not saying no when we really need to. “The impacts are not trivial.” These were some of the impacts:

1. Negative feelings aimed at the self
2. Resentment towards the other and that undermines the relationship
   1. And they can feel that resentment
3. Physical impact – fatigue, overwhelm, oversleeping

This made me think about the role of anger in health. Yes that’s what I said! Anger in midlife particularly is how we create firm boundaries, protect ourselves from over-giving at the expense of our own health and peace of mind. It’s the pathway to saying no. Around perimenopause and menopause liver issues can often arise whether its issues with iron levels, metabolic-associated fatty liver disease, hot flashes and nightsweats, PMS irritability and hostility…in the Chinese model of emotions and disease the liver is central to these symptoms and to an undercurrent of persisting anger in midlife. What if we stopped judging ourselves for being ‘angry’ or ‘critical’ or ‘negative’ and starting asking ourselves, what are these emotions trying to protect me from? What are they making me feel like saying ‘no’ to?  Gosh there’s so much in this to I resonate with as a midlife woman.  Back to Maté….

There’s always a belief behind our inability to say no. for example, we think something will happen if we say no, or we’ll be perceived a certain way. So compassionately enquire into this, what are my beliefs here? If we say yes instead of no then what made us do this? Well, we might feel inauthentic, not supportive, not available and not a good friend if we say no. Perhaps we think we’ll be adandoned, rejected or cheated on. All these operational beliefs are undercurrents in how we make decisions, we weren’t born with them. We learned them as babies and children. Also, we tend to be harsher critics of our own actions compared to others.  

The next question posed to us is about those beliefs: “Where do you learn them?”

Time for some contemplation here but one thing I know for sure is that I learnt these beliefs in the family unit. And it was able being accepted or acceptable, being ‘good’ and likable. And being punished for being ‘bad’.

His motto: once you know where you learnt them, you can start to change and heal.

Saying ‘Yes’

There was one more question. So far everyone seemed to be getting a lot of value from the presentation so far. It was time to look at another aspect (or consequence) of not being able to say no, and that was being unable to say ‘yes’ to the things that you’re passionate about because you’ve been unable to say no to the things that don’t nourish or serve you? And now you have no time left.

“Where did you want to say yes but didn’t?” i.e saying yes to what you really want. “What are you not saying yes to?” What creative endeavours or interests have been sacrificed because you’ve not left yourself enough time and space for them?

Some other interesting points

There were so many great questions in the Q&A. I didn’t write them all down, just a few I thought were poignant. Particular with this concept of looking critically at the questions we ask and always recognising that we need to address the trauma within ourselves that lives on in us when looking to hear, rather than the trauma incident itself. Here are a few, I hope it’s okay to share these, I’ve amended them and made them more general. I found them really thought provoking. I guess there were over 9,000 people watching so it’s kind of out there in the world already :)! 

Q: How can I change my anxious attachment and fear of abandonment? He says, “you don’t need to change anything. You’ve earned your anxious attachment as a child, it’s the child part of you. You’ll never change that and that part of you will always be there and that fear was perfectly rationale so there’s nothing wrong with you. But what you want is for the adult part of you to show up and take care of the child part of you.” It reminds me a lot of the teachings of the Hoffman Process, which was the most powerful work I’ve experienced in this life journey of learning who I am. I did it in 2008 and my teacher was the wonderfully warm hearted late Marie Burrows, psychotherapist and innovator in the space of women’s birth rights in Australia. Fond memories. “The fear of abandonment isn’t just in your head, it’s in your body so feel your body and then the adult part of you needs to remind you in that moment that you’re okay. In allowing yourself to feel it, you’re not abandoning yourself….which is what you really need. You can feel it now, and you’ll survive it.”

Q: “How to deal with trauma from a narcissist mother?” Which apparently is a common question. He says “rather than focussing on the mother…try not to diagnose anybody else. Take the focus off her and put it on what impacts on yourself you’re trying to deal with.” You might fear abandonment or have a lot of emotional pain or anger. This is the trauma. the trauma isn’t the fact that your mother was narcissistic. The trauma is the wound you’re carrying right now. So “how do I deal with my difficulty dealing with this or that, or my shame and so on…”

Q: “How can I begin to unlearn unworthiness?” He says “there’s no such thing as feeling unworthy, it’s a belief. So ask yourself, how do I deal with this belief that I’m unworthy? The second point is, you don’t totally believe it because you’re here asking this question. You believe you don’t have the be that way and that you can be helped and you can deserve to be helped. Now notice the part of you right now, that believe it’s worthy of help. That’s the (self-belief) part of you that asked this question. Pay attention to that part of you.” He talked about guilt and shame being a coping mechanism for being unable to help or save others as a child because you were helpless to do so. We shift blame to ourselves to make the world more bearable when bad things happen to us in our childhood.