On honest self inquiry with
dr gabor maté
“Health is wholeness, and wholeness is authenticity.”
Dr. Gabor Maté is a renowned Canadian physician, bestselling author, and captivating speaker known for his deep insights into the connections between mind, body, and spirit. With compassion and expertise, he explores the roots of human experiences like addiction and chronic illness, advocating for holistic approaches that honor our emotional and psychological well-being.
Dr. Maté's work emphasizes the importance of honest self-inquiry and authenticity, inspiring countless individuals to embark on journeys of healing and self-discovery.
Here we share an excerpt from Dr. Maté’s conversation with Lily Cole. You can listen to more of their conversation via their podcast episode on Who Cares Wins.
GM: Do you know the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke? In his letters to the young poet he says: “We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.” If an animal is disconnected from the gut feelings, they're dead. So health means wholeness. When there's lack of authenticity, there's lack of wholeness. So no wonder, the more authentic you are, the more aligned you are, the healthier you are, the healthier you feel.
LC: I would like to first dive into authenticity. Most people don't actually want to have war and climate change. So why is it that we're collectively still enacting this kind of very destructive behavior?
The social psychologist Erich Fromm talked about the social character, which is different from the individual character of people. And the social character is basically what we take on how society wants us to be for its own maintenance.
And so in order for society to maintain itself, it has to create individuals that go and internalize fundamental values and fundamental intentions. So if you look at the fundamental intentions or values in a capitalist system, it's that people should consume, it's that people should be passive, and it's that people should be essentially disconnected from themselves. Nobody sits down and plans this. I'm saying this is just how the system works.
So, in terms of disconnecting from ourselves the way we bring up children is that we don't honor their emotions. We pick and choose which emotions the child is able to express and still be acceptable to us. And many of the more important emotions, like grief or fear or anger... You know, a kid who's got fears, they're sissy. A kid who's angry, they're bad, they're made to sit by themselves.
So this is the social character. And the main trait of it that we identify is that there should be a separation from the self. When a kid can't express all their emotions, they're gonna have to disconnect from themselves. In order to fit in, they have to disconnect from themselves.
Take any advertisement on television: In your real life, you'd never spend a minute with a person who talked like that.
Do you have advice for anyone who wants to be more authentic, and who maybe doesn’t even realize the ways in which they're being inauthentic, how they can go on that path?
Well, at some point, for a lot of people, the inauthenticity will create consequences, so then they start questioning. And at a certain point, I would imagine for anybody, the pressure becomes too great. It's either complete self suppression or suffering, or here I am, take it or leave it.
I mean, the reason I argue in my book that women have 80 percent of autoimmune disease is because they're the people who are expected to suppress themselves to serve the needs of others. And to suppress the healthy anger and to take responsibility for others ignoring their own needs. That's inauthenticity, not in a moral sense, but in a practical sense, that lack of authentic connection to self manifests in autoimmune disease, which is why I think women have 80 percent of autoimmune disease.
Or depression: Look at the word depression itself. What does it mean? It means to push something down. What gets pushed down in depression? Emotions. Why do people push down their emotions? Because they got the message that if they had their full emotions, they weren't acceptable.
No, they push themselves down, become inauthentic, and then 35 years later, they're diagnosed with this disease called depression. Well, you can call it a disease, but where did it come from? So inauthenticity exacts a heavy price, physically, socially, mentally, relationally.
And in what ways do you sense that it's driving the climate crisis?
Would you agree that it's the biggest threat facing humankind?
Yes, I would.
Okay. Now, if I were to confront you in the streets chasing you with a knife, would you just carry on with your regular life and business? Or would you try and do something to evade or counter the threat?
Now, the climate crisis, as myself, I'm not immune to this, and anybody I know who's halfway rational and not completely manipulated or in denial, will agree. How much of my time do I spend actually doing anything about it? Politically or personally. So I'm living like this guy chasing me with a knife and I'm going on about my life.
You might ask a lot of people, it's climate change is an issue, they'll say yes, but in their political lives, they don't lift a finger.
Well, that's a disconnection.
It's a kind of collective insanity that we have the best scientists, almost all the scientists now, year on year giving warnings in very, very explicit terms and more and more urgently every year. And then things just carry on like normal.
Yes, exactly. So that's what I mean by inauthenticity on a massive scale.
Honest self inquiry leads to compassion and engagement.
Do you think there is any risk in the increasing focus on individual stories and individual healing, that it focuses a lot on the individual rather than the collective?
If the question is, does self inquiry and self awareness threaten social engagement, the answer is just the other way around, that the more connected people are to themselves, the more they know themselves, the more they want to contribute because they realize that their true nature is to belong.
Now, then there's the self development industry in this society, which is all about manifesting abundance and becoming the best version of myself. Well, that's the typical capitalist individualistic ethic. And that does get in the way of social engagement. But that's not honest self inquiry.
That's just self enhancement.
And where do you see the line between self inquiry and victimhood and how not to move from one to the other?
Victimhood says that I'm at the effect of something that happened to me a long time ago. And self inquiry says: Oh, the way I've been functioning is because of something that happened to me, but once I realized this, I have both the possibility and the responsibility to get agency over my life.
So self inquiry leads to agency, victimhood is the denial of agency. I'm this way because you did this to me five years ago, or my mother did this to me, or didn't do this to me, or for me. So, you know, that's victimhood. Victimhood says that I'm helpless and I'm at the effect of something that somebody else did.
In any relationship, it's almost inevitable that sometimes you move into this victim stance, but that's the opposite of self inquiry. So self inquiry empowers, victimhood is by definition disempowered,. ot Not only is it a disempowered state, it's also a state of denying responsibility. When I say denying responsibility, I don't mean denying guilt. I mean, it's denying that I can respond, that I'm responsible. So victimhood is the surrender of responsibility.
Is there anything you want to share in terms of hope you have?
I don't deal in hope because I mean it's a bit of a semantic issue. You know, what does somebody mean by hope? Hope usually means that I wish that something will happen in the future. It's a possibility. And possible is in the present. So it's possible that people can wake up. And I can do something to help myself wake up. And I'm not talking about me individually, but also everybody. So possibility is what's available to us now that helps us create a better present and therefore better future.
So I make a decision between hope and possibility. Hope is rather passive. If it's possible that people can wake up, then what can I do now to help people wake up? If it's possible that I can wake up, then what is it that I can do now to help me wake up? So that's in the present.
Do you feel like people are waking up?
What I see is that this western globalized capitalist culture is going to deeper into crisis: the inequality is rising, the pathology is rising and so on. At the same time it's dialectic like Karl Marx or Hegel would have pointed out, that each system creates its own contradictions and so at the same time as it's getting more difficult for people, a lot more people are starting to ask questions
More people are waking up. So both things are happening: On the one hand, you get the unconsciousness, the darkness spreading. You can see that in the political realm, across Europe and North America, for sure. But at the same time, I don't go anywhere now without people coming up to me and thanking me for my work. And the same thing is true for other colleagues in the trauma world. Bessel VanDerKolk, The Body Keeps The Score, it’s a book on trauma and not an easy read. It was 230 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. I mean, what's the issue? It means that people are really starting to wake up. A lot of people. Soo both are happening at the same time. In fact, the one creates the other.
You can listen to more of this conversation between Dr. Gabor Maté and Lily Cole via the Who Cares Wins podcast.
Read more about Dr. Gabor Maté’s work on drgabormate.com.