Gabor Maté and the Reason We’re All Addicted

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So I wrote this book, Bucky Fucking Dent, which takes as its backdrop the 78 pennant race between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The book is about loving the losers, really, and it's really, in many ways, the same kind of philosophical bent as this podcast. It's about how failure, in this case the Boston Red Sox, losing every year since 1918, teaches you to be a better human being, teaches you to be a more empathetic human being, teaches you more about life than winning, winning, winning. So that's kind of what I'm dealing with there, and also there's one of the underpinnings of the book is the disruption of a father-son relationship. that happens very early on in the child's life.

The child gets sick, the father gets scared, there's a disruption.

And when I was reading Gabor's book, The Myth of Normal, I was thinking about these things and how he's writing about these things in a clinical or philosophical or doctorly way, of issues that I'm going at artistically or as a novelist, in a novelistic way. And I thought that's an interesting place where we can find common ground. So I wanted to send Gabor the copy of the movie that I made of Bucky Fucking Dan, which I did. And I felt a little icky about it, because it is a weird thing to send your work to somebody whose work you're going to be talking about. It was a little like, hey, look, we're going to be looking at you, but let's first look at me.

But I overcame that.

It might not have been hard enough to overcome it, but I overcame it. And he liked it so much.

I'm David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are.

So Gabor Mate's latest book is called The Myth of Normal, and it really kind of refrains the narrative over what is normal and what is abnormal from society's point of view. And the big premise is basically that we're sick because society's sick. Our mental health, our physical health, our addictions are all linked to the pressures of modern-day living. But Gabor also talks about parenting, and as a parent, I was fascinated and am fascinated with how Gabor talks about parenting. And I was struck by the discussion of parenting and attachment and how a break in the attachment, especially at a very young age, could be very detrimental, traumatic, is what he calls it, specifically, between zero and three.

And this book has been a huge success for Gabor, and it's what I wanted to talk to him. How do we deal with these pre-verbal injuries in a verbal way? So all right, here's my conversation with Gabor.

I felt an inability to reattach.

Would you talk to me in the same way?

And the fear of losing your daughter was just overwhelming for you. And so you didn't decide to shut your heart down. You didn't wake up one morning and say, hi, David, I'm going to shut my heart down to my daughter now. It was an automatic movement inside you, wasn't it? It wasn't conscious.

It wasn't deliberate.

And so all that happened was that when that pain got re-triggered, you went back to your childhood self-protection, which is to close down your heart.

That's one point. Two other points. One is, I often say to people, when in your life did you not feel guilty?

Yeah. When in your life did you not feel guilty?

So that's the second point. The third point is, the last thing our children need from us, and believe me, I get this message from my kids all the time, is a guilty parent. They don't want to be seen through the eyes of our guilt. Nobody wants to be seen as somebody else's mistake, you know? My son, my kids are not, but for all the years that I carried this guilt, and I just saw them, that's actually, I was only seeing myself.

I wasn't seeing them at all. I wasn't seeing their creativity, their wonder, their capacities, their resilience. I was just seeing what I had done wrong. And so that's a very, the guilt is very narcissistic. that way.

It is, yeah. And it keeps you from seeing the other person. So that's my little sermonette, if you can take that.

So trauma is a wound that's not healed. That's the good news. If the trauma was what happened to you and I, it's over. It's done. It never will not have happened, but that's not the trauma.

The trauma is not what happens to us. The trauma is what happens inside us. The trauma is the wound that we're carrying. And so that, you know, if I can use the analogy, if I get a blow on the head, the trauma is not the blow on the head. The trauma is the concussion.

And the wound can be healed. in the present moment. It doesn't mean having to go back to the past. And those pre-verbal traumas that you talk about, and they're just universal. almost, we carry them in our bodies today.

It shows up in our body language, in the tone of our voice,

in the tension in our chest or our bellies or in our muscles, tightness of our throats, whether our jaws are clenched or not. It shows up in many, many, many ways. And when I work with, when I teach my students on how to work with trauma, it is far more than just talking. It's actually about being present to what the whole body is experiencing in this moment, because the portal to healing is through the body. And so that trauma, healing isn't just understanding something intellectually.

It's actually working through the emotions. And emotions are physical events that are present for us at all times, if we know how to pay attention to them. So I don't know any trauma, psychological trauma, that cannot be healed.

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These people I worked with in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, which is North America's most notorious and concentrated area of drug use.

Well, the differences are obvious, but what always struck me was the similarities, which are much more interesting. That's the first thing that drew me there. And I understood these people, you know, because I saw myself in them. Number one. Number two, there's something about that population that they lie and they cheat and they manipulate.

They have to. That's how they get their drugs. But they don't pretend not to lie and cheat and manipulate. They're really authentically themselves. I mean, you know, you've been in the glittering world of Hollywood and elsewhere, and you know all the facades that people erect and hide behind, and behind them there's all this misery, but on the surface they're just beautiful people.

And that degree of authenticity, of not having to pretend anything, that's just such a refreshing atmosphere to work in.

Which meant that it doesn't matter how busy I was, I was always taking on new patients, because I needed to be needed, so I would never say, no. You want to come to me, my patient? Oh, I must be a good guy, you know. Well, underneath that is the belief that I'm not worthwhile, you know, so I have to prove my worth to my work. But I also had a severe shopping addiction, particularly to music, and people laugh, you know, but no, I'd spend three, four thousand dollars someday on classical music, and I had to go back the next day, or even in the same day, and naturally I would lie about it to my wife, and I would ignore my kids to pursue my addiction.

It had significant consequences for my family life, so the addiction was to acquiring more and more.

that was the one area, you know, coming from the relationship with my mother.

and so my achievements were not my own. Whatever I did, whatever grades I got, whatever I did in basketball, whatever, it was always a reflection on her, in a way, in a way it felt that way. And sex was the one area where I was in the dark to her, you know, and it became, yeah.

they'll get pissed off about addiction as a disease, which is, it's not a great word for it, you know, because I think it confuses people. But if we could have as much empathy and kind of just that pivot of, hey, what's right about it? You know, what was, it works until it doesn't work anymore, and then it fails miserably, you know.

There might even be an element of envy about it, because a lot of people would love to see themselves as sexually desirable and free.

There was laughter, you know, where people say, I wish I was a sex addict or something like that, you know, and that's hurtful. And then there was, in my mind,

I just didn't know what people were imagining I was into. You know, I had this, I had a judgment, you know, that was coming from me. And I wanted to say, you know, I wanted to clear it up and say, you know, I'm not this, and I'm not that, I'm this, you know. And it wasn't just about what you're saying, it's the dynamic of what it is I'm using it for. That's the point.

It's not what I'm using.

there's a reason why we ostracize the identified drug addicts so severely. It's because we don't like to see ourselves reflected in their behavior. But when you look at the society as a whole, when I asked the question, it doesn't matter where I am, how many of you had dynamics where you were engaged in behavior that gave you temporary pleasure or craving and relief, and then you suffer negative consequences and you didn't give it up, almost everybody will put their hands up. So that in this society, which deprives us so thoroughly of our essential human needs for connection, contact, intimacy, love, and self-acceptance, addictions are the norm. And it's just that we ostracize a certain segment of the population so that we can deny our own presence on that same addictive spectrum.

And it's so much, that's the other aspect of my title, The Myth of Normals, is that there's so many things that are normal in this society that are so common and so ubiquitous as to look like this is the normality, but in fact, what is normal in this society is neither healthy or natural. And if you look at the many ways in which the society feeds addictions and glorifies them and profits off them, and how many products and blandishments

and seductions are out there in the economy that are designed to take people away from themselves and give them temporary soothing so they don't feel their pain. I mean, almost the whole economy runs on that.

my response was to go back and think about my relationship to my mother. And let me tell you, I came up with the realization that I started thinking about why I became an actor.

I grew up with a mother who, like you, was given away when she was very young to be with relatives and, I think, was scarred by that forever and was an emotionally fragile and scared person. And my job, I like to make her laugh. That's what I did. Somehow, I was the one who could make her laugh. But the flip side to that deal was my emotions, my negative or unsavory emotions, like anger or independence from her.

And then I walked into acting class and here were these people and there was this world where emotions were actually the currency. I had stumbled into a world of play, as you might say,

where all these things that seemed so dangerous to me in life were actually not only not dangerous, but they were appraised. And I came to this through reading your book, so I just wanted to thank you for kind of opening up that part of myself. that kind of led me to a direction that I'm still kind of walking in in many ways.

And the other thing about acting is, and plays, is that it's very much like real life, because when you watch a play, the characters don't know that they're scripted. They think they're free.

Yeah. And we don't learn from experience, and then we keep reenacting the same dramas over and over again.

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In the myth of normal, to me it's not just a map of healing, but it's an actual act of healing for you, because you wrote it with your son. Can you talk a little about that as a healing and also how difficult that must have been at some points in the creation of it?

So this is a kid who, when he was three years old, I whacked him across the face for not saying happy birthday to me, you know.

And, as he writes in the book, myth of normal, in our home, the floor was never the floor. He was never sure when the emotional floor would cave in under his feet. And, of course, I've had this awareness of how my, you might say, dysfunctions when they were small helped to shape my kids' lives and challenges.

And then I had to cater all this guilt about it, you know.

And that's from my point of view. From Diane's point of view,

I'm the one who helped to shape his nervous system. That's just what happens. Parents shape their kids' nervous systems and their brains. That's biological science. And sometimes, when I'm writing the book, I got into very difficult states because this is a difficult book to write.

I mean, this took me 10 years to research. There's so much at stake. At times I would get despondent or pessimistic about my capacity to even finish it. And then my emotional states, he'd have to live with these anxieties on the part of his father and work with them, you know.

So I reached out to a therapist and what I learned was that my problem wasn't the book. My problem was my relationship to the book. And that I identified myself so much with the success of this book. So that if this book didn't succeed, then, despite whatever I've done before in the world, my failure or incompetence or lacks would be exposed to the world. So I had to disidentify from the book.

I had to say, okay, I'll do my best. If it fails, I'm still an okay person, you know, and worthwhile. And this is where my son really helped me a lot. I mean, I'd written four books before, and they were well-written books. But this one, I really needed help.

And so this is where Daniel came into it. And thank God.

And yet here we were committed to this project together. And actually, what helped us work our way through it, apart from our own desire to make it work between us, despite the old stuff that stood in the way. But we had a commitment. We had a commitment to a publisher that this book would be done. So, instead of that commitment, eventually I had to let go of my initial reactions.

And okay. And you know what? Most of the time, what he had to say or what he contributed was just a gift. You know? Yeah.

But my initial egoic reaction is to be defensive and to militate on behalf of the way I said it and what I said. This has to be right.

But you've said, and I find this to be very interesting, you've said that parents should have disciples in their children.

And that's what's interesting about the parent-child relationship is that no relationship starts off as unequal. I mean, when you meet a friend, your level of relative equality, when you meet an intimate partner or potential intimate partner, there's some level of equality. So, yeah, the parent needs to show up in such a way that the child trusts and loves the parent, feels the love of the parent, so the child will naturally want to follow the parent. So the parent doesn't have to exhort and punish and threaten or hit. The child will just naturally, that's just what happens.

And if you look at traditional societies, particularly I'm talking about indigenous societies in the land, that's pretty much how it worked. Now, as the relationship becomes more equal, as the child individuates and becomes their own person, that discipleship now becomes mutual. And at a certain point, you know, that Cosby Stills and Nash song about teach your children. well. Yeah.

At some point they say teach your parents, well, you know. And at some point, yeah, we have to learn from the kids, you know, when it's appropriate. In fact, you know what, right from the beginning, we have to learn from them. But at a certain point that discipleship becomes very much a mutual exchange.

You know, within our culture, can we raise children like that?

Then we can compensate. Yes, we can do it, but we have to be aware of it. And that means literally going against many of the teachings and expectations and practices of this culture.

So that was the social evil of that time. And my kids are growing up at a time where we're saying the phones are the devil.

But they have to be prepared to live in that world because the phones aren't going away. And if I try and enforce a more bucolic vision on them, maybe I'm doing them a disservice. That was the way I justified it to myself.

And if you even look at the brain scans of children who are on screens and phones a lot, their brains are not developing the way they naturally would. Nothing wrong with the phones. It's a question of when do you introduce them. Now, you introduce them when you have such a relationship with your children that they don't need the phones and they rely on your guidance. It doesn't have to happen before seven or eight or nine.

They're not going to lose anything. It'll take a kid one day to catch up with the technology, believe me. They don't lose anything. What they gain in terms of self-awareness and self-discipline and self-motivation is much greater than any conceivable disadvantage that you get from not using the phones early. So I would say, yeah, bring in the phones when they're ready for it.

Until then, they're not. And again, it goes back to the centrality of the parent-child relationship. If it's working, it's fine. If it's not working, the phones become the competitor, the devil that tempts the child on the wrong path.

Let them deal with the boredom. Let them deal with the boredom.

And the main writer of that book is a psychiatrist friend of mine, Gordon Neufeld. And Gordon, and I don't believe in timeouts and sending kids to their rooms and all this. And Gordon says jovially that the only time you should send a kid to his room by himself is when he says he's bored.

Let him go and find something to do. But basically, a kid who is comfortable with themselves, they're never bored.

You give them a puddle and a stick and they'll be happy the whole day. So the boredom itself is a sign of estrangement from self.

And when you look around at our culture today, what do you see as healing? And I wonder what are our children, how are they learning how to be adult humans, productive, empathetic humans in the culture today?

I've experienced it. Most people at some point have the capacity to be touched by compassion. So that's a healing force in itself. We don't just create it. That's a part of who we are as human beings.

And then, more specifically, in the last few years, and I doubt that you and I would have been having this conversation 15 years ago.

Right now, there's so much more awareness of trauma and the need for healing, the need for parenting that's loving and unconditionally accepting. So as society, in one sense, descends into more chaos and more darkness, the forces of light are also waking up. So I think healing is a capacity that's inherent to human beings and also to human societies. Maybe not the particular forms of societies. Forms have to change.

But culture will go on. I know that's a very general answer, but fundamentally...

So it's just a reality.

I'm moved by that.

I think we should just end right there. I want to thank you for being so open with me and compassionate, and for modeling that.

I hope I can return the favor. Well, thank you.

And I wanted to thank you, and it wasn't enough, somewhere in my mind, to thank you. Some way I had to give you something back. Thank you. It's an honor to meet you. And I'm so grateful that you talked to me and talked to me in the way that you did.

Thank you.

What I'm finding about the podcast is what makes an episode good is if I'm surprised. It's like any work of art I've ever been involved in. If I'm surprised, something good is going on. If I'm writing and I'm surprised by what I'm writing, that's great. That's a sure sign that you're in a good place.

Same with acting. Surprises, mistakes, things like that. The best. They read, the best on film.

And, you know, you go into these podcasts thinking, I only got such amount of time with this person, and I want to cover these things. But you have to leave room to be surprised. And you have to let go of the reins enough to be surprised. So you should prepare.

But the best moments, they come out of nowhere.

And in this case, with Gabor, I believe it was seeing him get emotional over certain things. Seeing him take his time to answer certain things.

My outstanding feeling after doing the interview was one of just immense gratitude. Not only to Dr. Maté, but to people who are doing this podcast with me. To put me in a position where I can have such a powerful conversation for me personally with somebody. That's what this podcast was in that case.

So, shit.

There's more. Fail Better. with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content. like more of my behind-the-scenes thoughts on this episode.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Keegan Zemma, Aria Bracci, and Donny Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson.

Our VP of new content is Rachel Neal. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Krupinski, and Kate D. Lewis. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittles-Wax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer, and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis, Rowan, and Sebastian Modak.

Special thanks to Brad Davidson. You can find us online at Lemonada Media, and you can find me at David Duchovny. You know what it means when I say at David Duchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.

Get ready to dive into some of the funniest podcasts around with Lemonada Media's comedy lineup. You can enjoy Choice Words with Samantha Bee as she laughs along with guests while they talk about their sometimes questionable life decisions. Or listen in as Sarah Silverman answers unpredictable voicemails from her fans on the Sarah Silverman podcast. And don't miss Threedom, where Scott Aukerman, Paul F. Tompkins, and Lauren Lapkus hang out, tell stories about each other, and see who can make the other two laugh the most.

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