Trauma Informed Understanding – Gabor Mate

I aim to inform you of people and projects that are already happening in the world that you are unlikely to hear about in the main stream media which prefers to feed us on a constant limited diet of information and stories.
I believe the consequence of this is what I call the 3 D’s:  Debilitation, Dependency and Dread.

Gabor Mate
After reading (and re-reading!) one of his books, I made a point of attending a one day workshop he gave about his his realisation in his fifties about how his early trauma impacted on his own life, those he cared for and cared about.
He talked about his ADHD, his workaholic tendencies, mood swings and how he is now training people in a therapeutic approach to resolve the traumas that create problems in our lives.

Born to Jewish parents in Budapest toward the end of the Second World War, Dr Gabor Maté had a difficult early life. An infant in Nazi-occupied Hungary, Maté was profoundly affected by a traumatic period of separation from his parents and, though he could not understand it at the time, by the atrocities of the Holocaust.
He has since come to view intensely stressful experiences in the first months and years of life as a major source of physical and mental illness.
He worked for many years as a doctor in family and palliative medicine in Vancouver, and also spent twelve years helping people struggling with drug addictions.
It wasn’t until he reached his fifties that he realised that he himself experienced ADHD and addictive. obsessional behaviours as a result of his own early trauma.

More recently, using an approach he has formulated called ‘Compassionate Inquiry’,  he leads training courses for therapists, health professionals and educators, among others.
This follows a model of understanding mental and physical suffering: that is, using scientific knowledge alongside deep enquiry into the psychological and social conditions of our lives.
This approach identifies self-destructive methods of coping with emotional pain caused by long hidden or unrecognised traumas, offering an individual the opportunity to understand their behaviour not as problems but as misguided attempts to solve these problems

While he is clear that the deep roots of our suffering are not always quick or easy to shift, he clearly believes that while we live we can change; as long as there is life, there is the possibility of renewal and repair.

He is the author of ‘Scattered Minds’, ‘In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts’ and ‘When the Body says No’

Website: drgabormate.com
Twitter: @DrGaborMate
Books: drgabormate.com/book
BBC Ideas: www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/addiction-is-a-response-to-emotional-pain/p07tnh6m
‘How To Academy’ talk on the connection between stress and disease (2019): www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajo3xkhTbfo
Transcript of Old Vic Theatre’s ‘One Voice’ project (2019): www.oldvictheatre.com/news/2019/10/there-is-only-one-boat-the-myth-of-normalcy-by-dr-gabor-mate