Speaker 1So I want to dip into psychology and addiction. I want to talk about some of the most popular thinkers, speakers in the addiction recovery field. People that talk about a different way to look at addiction. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about Gabor Mate and Bessel van der Kolk. These two individuals have a little bit of a different way of looking at addiction. And I like to explore these types of things because it interests me in the way I think about my addiction and my addict brain and the way I think about recovery as well. So the question is never why the addiction, but why the pain? This is Gabor Mate's famous line. You've heard him a lot on podcasts maybe, but he has a very interesting take on trauma and the way that pain is being escaped by drugs and alcohol. And that's what addiction is. That one sentence did more to take the shame out of addiction than almost anything written this century. It says, you're not bad. You're hurt. And I believe it. Mostly. Today, I want to sit with two people who built the modern trauma model. Take what's real and be honest about where it gets oversold. Because the wrong version of this idea can trap you. So the two thinkers. First, we have Gabor Mate, a Vancouver physician, worked for years on drug addiction. He's been working for years with addicts in the downtown east side of Vancouver, which if you haven't been is a very frontline rough area for drug addiction, especially with fentanyl. He wrote the book in the realm of hungry ghosts. He's a Budapest born son of a Holocaust survivors. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors. And he's open about his own trauma and workaholism. The thesis addiction is not a moral failure and it's a way to deal with pain. And that pain usually traces to trauma and early adversity. So the useful first question isn't why the addiction? It's why the pain? Yeah, I like to think of this because all of us have trauma. I think a lot of people misunderstand the word misinterpret the word trauma. When we hear trauma, we think it has to be child abuse or emotional abuse or sexual abuse, something grand and something that really sticks out in our lives. But trauma is not, you know, that the event that happened, it's how your body interpreted and stored that information, how your body remembers that trauma, that thing that happened to you. So I'll give you an example. When I was in grade four, I got suspended a lot. I got suspended from school, because I drew a very inappropriate picture. I was bullying another person in the class. And I remember my dad took me to a coffee shop. And he was trying to make me learn a lesson because they didn't know what to do with me. At the time, he was this kid that, you know, was smart in school and doing well, and couldn't help. I was a bully, I'm going to be fully transparent, I was bullied, and I was also a bully. And my dad brought me to this coffee shop, middle of the day, busy place. And he brought the picture that I drew of this individual in my class, and he slammed it down on the counter. And I remember I was so embarrassed to have that picture face up in the coffee shop. I thought everyone was looking at me, I thought everyone was looking at me. I thought everyone knew that I had been suspended. I thought everyone was talking about me. This is an incident of trauma that happened in my life. It's not the reason I became a drug addict, but it's a part of my childhood. It's a part of, that's the one thing that I remember being extremely embarrassed. And so here's how I trace it to possible addiction. This is just off the top of my head, because I don't spend too much time thinking about this anymore, because I've dealt with it a lot in therapy. But that fear of being perceived by that coffee shop, that fear of embarrassment of people talking about me, thinking about me, my mind chattering and racing, and the shame that I was experiencing in that moment carried with me until when I grew up. And there are many other moments where this factored in and became a part of my trauma that I would later escape. That's just my thesis on it. Again, that's not the reason I became a drug addict. I had a very good childhood. My childhood was amazing. I had everything I needed and wanted. But I always felt like I wasn't in the right body. I always felt like I wasn't in the right life. I always felt like I wasn't in the right household. I always wanted more. I always wanted to be richer, have more toys, have more things. I was always comparing myself to my neighbors and the other kids in my class. And I was never satisfied in my own skin. And that's just one instance that I can remember where the trauma was stored in my body and possibly in my mind, I guess. The second addiction thing that we have is a psychiatrist. His name is Bessel van der Kok. He's a psychiatrist that spent decades with trauma survivors. He has a book called The Body Keeps Score. You probably heard this book. It's very popular. And it's a very good book. I've never read it, but I've heard really good things. 3 million plus copies sold and years on the bestseller list. The thesis, trauma isn't only a memory you carry in your head. It reshapes the body and nervous system and lives there. Which is why in his view, healing often needs body-based work, movement, yoga, EMDR, neurofeedback, not just taking it through, talking it through, sorry. So for those who don't know, EMDR is a form of therapy. I'm not too confident on this, but I was supposed to do it with one of my therapists, never got around to doing it, but it's something with eye movement, rapid eye movement. And it unlocks some of the past traumas. I've heard it's a very successful modality of healing. So for those who don't know, EMDR is a form of therapy. I've heard it's a very successful modality of healing. So for those who don't know, EMDR is a form of therapy. I've heard it's a very successful modality of healing. The symptom on the surface, the drink, the panic, the numbness is the body and psyche coping with pain underneath that never got processed. Treat the wound, not just the behavior. Where this lands in recovery, the de-shaming, why the pain turns the addict from a bad person into a hurt person. That reframe is for a lot of people, the first door out of self-hatred. Yeah. Forgiving yourself is one of the most, you know, the most important integral parts of addiction recovery. We do a lot of bad shit in addiction, a lot of shit that we're not proud of. I've done a lot of stuff that I'm not proud of that I would never do sober. And there's an important part where, yes, you can ask for forgiveness from the universe, God, whatever your spiritual connection is, but there's a level of forgiveness that has to be done for yourself. And until this is done, you're not going to think you're a good person. Really. I need to forgive myself for all that I've done. It's happened. There's no use dwelling on it and beating myself up over it. I've done enough of that. I've said worse things to myself than anyone could ever say to me. I've beat myself up worse than anybody else, but you have to come to a point in my experience. I had to come to a point where I was, I was, I forgive, forgave myself for all the behavior that I exhibited in addiction recovery. And I didn't say, oh yeah, well, I was just drunk or high. It wasn't that it was, I took down that I didn't need to repeat that behavior and that it was wrong and I shouldn't have done it. I can make amends, but I'm also not a piece of shit because of the stuff that I did. I don't have to feel shame over it. I can feel guilty about it, but not hate myself or beat myself up about my past. And I'm not saying that guilt is, is a positive thing to feel either, but it's just something that happens relapsing and hating myself after I relapsed. That was a process to come back and forgive myself. For picking up again and throwing away seven and a half years, or what I thought was throwing away seven and a half years, the body piece cravings and relapse, aren't purely a willpower deficit. There's a nervous system doing what it learned to do. There's a restlessness and irritability and physical pull that your body craves the substance for. This is a powerful lens, not settled science. Both men shifted the culture toward compassion. And that's a real gift, but the strong casual claims outrun the evidence and a recovery show that pretends otherwise is something selling something. So I'll give you the other side of this, where the critics push back. So for Gabor Mate, addiction specialist, Stanton Peel and psychologist, Nick Haslam, University of Melbourne make the same core point. Most people with addiction were not traumatized as children. And most people who were traumatized do not become addicted. Trauma raises risk. It doesn't write destiny. A theory that explains every case ends up explaining none of them precisely. What is well supported? The broad link between early adversity and later problems. The ACE test, adverse childhood experience research. So the moderate claim, adversity raises risk, stands. The strong claim, all addiction is trauma, doesn't necessarily stand. When it comes to trauma, it doesn't necessarily stand. The ACE test, adverse childhood experience research. So the moderate claim, all addiction is trauma, doesn't necessarily stand. the literal tidy, the body keeps score mechanism as popularly understood. So he's basically validating the book, but overselling the science. The recovery danger. When somebody says my trauma made me this way can flip from liberating to imprisoning. If your past fully explains you, it can start to feel like a life sentence, permanently broken, nothing to be done. Peel's sharpest point, locating addiction in fixed trauma imprints makes it look permanent, even though most people do eventually move out of addiction. Recovery needs agency, not just explanation. The honest frame, the pain is real and you're not sentenced by it. Understanding why you hurt is a starting line, not a verdict. Question to sit with. Does understanding my pain free me or does it give me a place to hide? My pain is real, and I'm still responsible for blank.
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