What if the version of you that feels<br>broken was never the real you at all?<br>What if your trauma isn't your identity,<br>but a response to pain you never<br>deserved? Dr. Gabbor Mate reveals the<br>truth society never told you. that your<br>disconnection, your self-doubt, your<br>addiction to people pleasing or<br>perfection is not who you are. In this<br>conversation, you'll discover how to<br>remember the real you, the one who was<br>never broken, stay with us because this<br>might change<br>everything. If you've ever felt unheard,<br>unseen, or like the wounds from your<br>past still hold you back, you're not<br>alone. This space is for you. Here we<br>heal, we grow, and we rediscover who we<br>truly are. Beyond the pain, beyond the<br>past. And if you're ready to step into<br>your healing journey and finally embrace<br>your authentic self, hit that subscribe<br>button because your inner child matters.<br>And together, we can rewrite your story.<br>Social media really takes away the nuts<br>and bolts of human communication,<br>provides only the surface manifestation.<br>So the masquerade is communication. So<br>there's a lot of disconnect in this<br>society. People l literally don't know<br>their neighbors. Neighborhoods are no<br>longer neighborhoods. They're<br>isolated doiciles for the most part,<br>which means there's a deep hunger for<br>connection. And the social media<br>provides a similacum of connection. the<br>the the tens of<br>[Music]<br>connection. If you're using something<br>for temporary relief or pain relief or<br>or pleasure and you crave it despite<br>negative consequences, you got an<br>addiction.<br>There's an American psychologist uh who<br>read that human beings are all creatures<br>with special needs. And I think one of<br>our special needs is for<br>meaning. Our lives are not meant to be<br>just lived for the daily sake of<br>physical existence. Now that meaning in<br>a tribal setting is automatic for you<br>because you're bigger than yourself. You<br>belong to something greater than you.<br>And when you're connected with nature,<br>you're connected<br>with some spiritual practice or or<br>belief. You have some meaning that that<br>that transcends your daily struggles for<br>survival.<br>This society is pretty much reduced<br>stuff like we we talk about meaning a<br>lot and we talk about raw values such as<br>freedom and democracy and so on but<br>that's not what people experience in<br>their daily lives. Nobody experiences<br>democracy in their daily lives. Most of<br>people work in institutions where<br>they're told what to do and they have no<br>voice on the matter<br>whatsoever and the freedom is very often<br>used to making choices in meaningless uh<br>alternative. So there's a deep and<br>there's more and more disconnection we<br>already mentioned. So there's there's a<br>deep lack of<br>The addictions can certainly come along<br>and provide a false temporary but<br>momentarily satisfactory to<br>meaning. And um meaning is is important<br>to all of us. We all want to feel<br>there's something more significant about<br>our lives than simply the fact that uh<br>we have dinner in the evening and we<br>defecate in the<br>morning. Well, first of all, what's the<br>case in this society is that people are<br>less than connected. uh human beings<br>were not meant to live in these uh from<br>the evolutionary point of view. We're<br>not designed to live in these complex<br>uh<br>vast um<br>aggregations. We're meant to live in<br>small hunter band hunter gatherer bands<br>where everybody knows everybody else and<br>there's deep connection between and<br>that's how we've lived for the most part<br>for millions of years hundreds of<br>thousands tens of thousands of years of<br>evolution until really quite recently.<br>So there's a lot of disconnect in this<br>society. People l literally don't know<br>their neighbors. Neighborhoods are no<br>longer neighborhoods. They're isolated,<br>doiciled for the most part, which means<br>there's a deep hunger for connection.<br>And the social media provides a similar<br>connection. The the the pretense of<br>connection. And so what do people have<br>on social media? They have<br>friends. They like each other. These are<br>attachment dynamics. These are<br>connection dynamics. But the friends<br>aren't real friends. Cuz real friends<br>know you. And you're not afraid to show<br>them who you are. In social media,<br>people have concocted an artificially<br>adorned<br>persona and it's these artificial<br>entities that then people like. So the<br>individual never gets a sense of being<br>really like cuz they know that it's just<br>an image<br>that and and the so-called friends are<br>not there for you when you need them.<br>Liking and friends are very strong<br>language, but social media is a pale<br>copier. So the less it meets your real<br>needs, the more addictive cuz the more<br>and more of it you need to<br>get. I'm not sure that it's caused, but<br>it certainly revealed the many<br>subcultures in this society and allows<br>people who belong to various<br>ideological groupings to identify one<br>another and to band together and to have<br>sort of a sudo camaraderie. So, we can<br>all hate the same thing. We can all be<br>hostile to the same people. Um<br>and anybody can express an<br>opinion. In the old days or news letters<br>to the newspapers, people had to be<br>pretty responsible what they wrote. They<br>had to identify themselves. Social<br>media, you can say anything you want<br>about anybody. Doesn't matter hurtful,<br>how wrong, how um hateful really and not<br>even identify yourself. So it allows<br>people who otherwise are on the margins<br>of society to aggregate in these pseudo<br>groups that then promote one another's<br>most negative tendencies. And there's no<br>guidance there. There's no leadership.<br>There's nobody to call you to your<br>senses. There's nobody to say, "Really,<br>do you really mean that? Is that what<br>you really intend? What's really going<br>on?" So there's peer groupings without<br>any kind of guidance. It's really like a<br>teenage gang phenomenon where people<br>band together mostly for negative<br>reasons. They're lacking contact so they<br>need to band together. So that's<br>legitimate. But they they get they band<br>together without mentorship, without<br>tradition, without uh adult guidance.<br>And so we see what we<br>see. Well, you see, as you and I are<br>speaking to each other early, uh we're<br>tracking each other's face and and our<br>ear muscles are actually adjusting<br>themselves automatically to hear not<br>just what's being said, but also the<br>tone of voice that is being said and you<br>will nod when I say something or I might<br>nod or smile when you say something. So,<br>communication is as much about these<br>non-verbal cues which are mediated<br>through our nerv nervous system as it is<br>about the verbal content. Now, none of<br>that exists on social media. It's not<br>genuine<br>communication. Human communication is<br>almost meant to be face to<br>face. And even if I were to write a<br>letter to somebody that I was going to<br>mail, that's a much more conscious and<br>um deliberate process than dashing<br>something off my social media and<br>pushing the send button in a state of<br>tizzy, you know, so that it's much less<br>impulsive.<br>So social media really takes away the<br>the nuts and bolts of human<br>communication and provides only the<br>surface manifestation. So what<br>masquerades communication is really uh<br>diet tribes very often and I know what<br>it's like because I get an email and<br>which might trigger me and then right<br>away I want to write it out and then<br>push the send button and boy have I had<br>to learn not to do that because uh<br>there's no reflection there. just<br>whatever emotion arises you express it<br>and then you communicate it right away<br>without any reflection. In my book the<br>what the addicts lack very often is<br>emotional self-regulation. They they<br>they uh the parts of the brain that<br>regulate our emotions including the<br>otoal cortex just don't develop in<br>addicted people because the conditions<br>for development are adequate. So the<br>brain does develop an interaction with<br>the environment. So now you have a lot<br>of people with brains that are not fully<br>developed. They might be intellectually<br>developed but the emotional circuits<br>aren't. So now you have a lot of people<br>with emotional<br>underdevelopment communicating<br>impulsively on social media and that's<br>what we're saying. And so people will<br>say horrible things on social media that<br>might not they might never even say in a<br>real person.<br>Let's pause here for a moment because<br>what Dr. Gabbor mate is saying is<br>something we all feel but rarely<br>name. Social media makes it easy to seem<br>connected but so many of us still feel<br>deeply alone. We post smiles, share<br>opinions but rarely show who we really<br>are. And that disconnection it feeds our<br>trauma. As Dr. Gabbor Mate says, "This<br>culture teaches us to hide our pain, to<br>fit in instead of be seen. But healing<br>means unlearning that. It means<br>realizing that your true self is not too<br>much. It's just been waiting for a safe<br>place to be known. Keep watching because<br>this truth matters."<br>that what is that that someone in this<br>life comes in with this ability to<br>connect<br>and come out of your own experience and<br>body into another space, another another<br>energy. Uh what is that? Well, it's a<br>mystery, isn't it? You know, you see it<br>a lot actually. You see it in artists<br>and uh performers.<br>Yeah. Something comes through them that<br>they can't manifest. something even<br>joyful and creative and and very<br>positive that in their own lives they<br>can't manifest at all. But when they're<br>when they're performing it it it just<br>happens. I think that has to do with how<br>some people are born very sensitive and<br>they just connect more naturally with<br>something outside themselves. Mhm. Um I<br>also think it comes through certain<br>degree of suffering that maybe you work<br>through you<br>know and and also I think you know this<br>is getting maybe more mystical than I<br>usually would venture into but there is<br>a truth there there's a larger unity<br>that there's a oneness that whether we<br>know it or whether we don't know it but<br>we all belong to and that can manifest<br>it manifest itself through us even if<br>our conscious mind and even our<br>personalities can't quite get a hold of<br>it. I think I think that's what that's<br>what's going on. Yeah, that's beautiful.<br>I I would agree. Is there anything that<br>you do that gets you into that space<br>more or allows for more of that to come<br>through um a situation you put yourself<br>in or a practice that you have?<br>I'm I'm not disciplined enough to have a<br>regular practice. I mean, I really do<br>have an AD I really do have an ADD brain<br>and and it<br>uh it it's a challenge for me to<br>meditate or to do yoga regularly, for<br>example. I mean, I do, but I don't keep<br>it up as much as I know would be good<br>for me. For me, that has come through<br>psychedelic work actually. Um, which<br>is not the same. I mean, as as as just<br>coming to it more<br>spontaneously, but that has that has put<br>me in those spaces sometimes and that's<br>been helpful for me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm<br>glad you brought that up because I I<br>definitely want to ask you about that.<br>Um I've done it myself a few different<br>times. Um I psilocybin. Yeah. MDMA, very<br>varying degrees of healing tools. Um<br>man, is this the future of therapy? Is<br>this the future<br>of psychology and growth and meeting<br>ourselves? Uh I think that a loss of<br>self is something you've said has been<br>is a problem in society and what keeps<br>us disconnected from from ourselves.<br>That loss of self through the<br>environment that we're in these days. So<br>psychedelics<br>essentially bring you back to that and<br>go beyond it into spaces my experience<br>that you don't you didn't know were<br>there. um aspects of yourself, truths<br>that you wouldn't have always otherwise<br>known. So it seems like this could be a<br>really a big healing tool moving<br>forward. Yes. So in this book, The Myth<br>of Normal, I do have one chapter on<br>psychedelics, which is probably<br>appropriate. So out of 33 chapters, one<br>is on psychedelics because I don't want<br>to put my eggs all into the psychedelic<br>basket.<br>Good. So like on the one<br>hand it it can be very powerful and the<br>first time I did Iawaska maybe 12 13<br>years ago I just experienced this pure<br>love that had I that had never accessed<br>before. You know I literally had tears<br>of love uh rolling down my cheeks and uh<br>I thought I had arrived somewhere. Well,<br>cuz my family could tell you two days<br>later I had glimpsed something, but I<br>hadn't arrived anywhere, you know. So,<br>uh, and I' I've I've led retreats and<br>I've helped people with psychedelics and<br>I've done, you know, myself. I think<br>there are great potential. I don't think<br>they are the answer. I don't think they<br>are the future. I think the future has<br>to be far more with the transformation<br>of people and of social structures and<br>and the culture itself. We can't rely on<br>one particular modality. What the<br>psychedelics do do is they<br>oftential and um what shows up as as you<br>say is things you weren't aware of. It's<br>almost like there's a membrane between<br>our conscious minds and all the stuff we<br>carry in our subconscious and the<br>psychedelics remove the membrane. It's<br>almost like you're going to have a<br>waking dream and<br>experience all the rage, all the hatred,<br>maybe all the terror, all the fear, but<br>all the beauty, all the love, all the<br>oneness, all the unity, all the joy, all<br>the presence that is in us and but be<br>awake for the experience and be able to<br>get in relationship to it. Uh,<br>psychedelics, I think, as you also<br>suggest, I think, can put in touch with<br>that unity that we're all a part of, but<br>we're hardly aware of it most of the<br>time. In fact, in this culture which is<br>all about competition and aggression,<br>greed and acquisition, we are almost u<br>society propaganda is into forgetting<br>that unity and that oneness and that<br>intercrection and psychist can open that<br>up<br>beautifully.<br>But then there's the rest of life, you<br>know, and what you glimpse and<br>experience in the secular like space.<br>The question is how to make those same<br>values<br>which people can attain without<br>psychedelics how to make those values<br>work in our regular lives in our social<br>lives in our culture and that that's a<br>question that goes way beyond<br>psychedelics I think sure that's culture<br>and society and the pattern we keep us<br>in outside of ourselves that pull us<br>back in so quickly. What do you think<br>holds us back the most when we come out<br>of that? Like we we get into these<br>spaces, we feel love, and then we get<br>back into our routine. Like if there<br>were a few things to change, what would<br>it be? Like when you came back, what<br>what did you think? This this this is<br>this is what society pulls me back into<br>the heart with with the hardest.<br>I think there's two forces pulling us<br>back into our ordinary, less unitarian,<br>less connected self. One is just um how<br>our personalities are formed in the<br>first<br>place which is very often in my<br>contention the result of responses to<br>traumatic events or traumatic pressures<br>that happen to children in this society<br>quite a lot. And so we form these<br>defensive structures that we call the<br>personality. And the personality doesn't<br>want to give up too easily<br>because when stuff happens in childhood<br>that makes you defensive and makes you<br>afraid or makes you um disconnected.<br>Mhm. Um those structures have been<br>living in you and dominating your life<br>depending how old you are for for<br>decades. They don't just disappear. They<br>don't just dissolve. You might get a<br>momentary restbite from them in a<br>psychic space but they haven't all of a<br>sudden evaporated. And the Buddha talked<br>about what he called our habit energies.<br>So our habit energies are the thoughts<br>and emotional patterns<br>and psychological structures that are<br>ingrained in our brains and our nervous<br>systems and our bodies and they just<br>reassert themselves almost<br>automatically. Then there's society<br>which is all<br>about how we look to others and what<br>other people think of us and how we fit<br>in and how we please others or how we<br>compete with others<br>and then we go back into that world. And<br>so it's no wonder that between the inner<br>habit energies that have dominated our<br>lives and any external pressures, we<br>quickly can lose the glow of that<br>spiritual or psychological insight that<br>we gained either through some spiritual<br>experience or through psychedelics or<br>with an encounter with nature perhaps.<br>So it's difficult to maintain that. And<br>then above all there is what my friend<br>the psychiatrist Dan Seagull calls the<br>um the the the myth of the solo self you<br>like we all fundamentally every ego<br>believes that it's a un that it's a<br>separate unit<br>sufficient unto itself you know and we<br>believe in our our separateness and and<br>this culture reinforces that belief of<br>course so it's it's it's not an easy not<br>an easy path man That brings me back to<br>uh so I did a uh a little bit of a<br>hero's dose of psilocybin. I took five<br>grams and it took me to a really distant<br>place and I went really far away. But<br>one of the main things that happened in<br>the experience was that and it was<br>facilitated. This was this was with a<br>facilitator and<br>um was<br>that I knew that being human wasn't<br>real.<br>And but I wanted to be human. Yes. And<br>so the first thing that I had to agree<br>to in order to build constructs to get<br>back to being human was I had to agree<br>to the mind. Yeah, that's right. And I<br>was like, great. Okay, perfect. Fine.<br>Let's go. I want I want to see my family<br>again. I want to see my dogs again. Um<br>because in the early part of the<br>experience, I didn't know how I was ever<br>going to be human again because I knew<br>it wasn't real. And so so yes, I had to<br>agree to the mind which in you know for<br>for me felt like the ego. It felt like<br>the stories. This was the lie because<br>being human wasn't real. The mind was<br>the lie which is the stories and the<br>ego. Yeah. Have you ever experienced<br>anything like that? Not personally. But<br>I can tell you about somebody I talked<br>to yesterday. You might know the name.<br>Her name her name is Anita Mjani. Do you<br>know that name? No. Okay. Ina<br>Majani wrote a book<br>um called dying to be me and um here was<br>a woman who know in my view of illness<br>as a physician I've noticed who gets<br>sick and who gets chronic illness and<br>malignancy it's people who really<br>repress themselves in order to fit in<br>with others and that's defensive<br>response to childhood experiences and<br>Nita was one of these people and she had<br>this terminal lymphoma, stage four<br>lymphoma. She was in a coma and the<br>doctor said, "This is in, you know, she<br>lives in LA, which is why I'm right. Um,<br>she was in a coma and the doctors have<br>telling her family to prepare for her<br>death within a few hours." Oh my<br>goodness. And then Anita had this out of<br>body near-death experience<br>where she saw her whole life where she<br>saw she had never been herself her whole<br>life. That's why the title of a book,<br>Dying to Be Me. It took near death to<br>make her become herself. But then she<br>was in this realm where she could have<br>chosen to stay<br>there. But she had to make a<br>decision. Do I stay there in this<br>beautiful realm of unity and light or do<br>I come back into my mind and my body?<br>And sounds very similar to your<br>experience. Mhm. I had that choice too.<br>And she said I made she said I made a<br>choice to come back. Now within four or<br>five days her lymphoma had disappeared<br>and within a few days she was out of<br>hospital and she's never been sick<br>since.<br>Now this is not totally unheard of and I<br>can sort of explain it in certain<br>physiological ways. But the point is she<br>was facing that same choice that you had<br>made and she just decided to come back.<br>Trauma doesn't just wound us. It shapes<br>how we see ourselves. how we relate to<br>the world and how we protect our most<br>vulnerable<br>parts. But beneath all of it, there is a<br>self that was never damaged, only<br>hidden. As Dr. Gabber Mate reminds us,<br>healing isn't about fixing what's<br>broken. It's about reconnecting with<br>what was always whole. The more we<br>understand our pain, the more we<br>remember who we truly are, human,<br>worthy, and already<br>enough. Healing takes time, and you<br>don't have to do it alone. If this<br>message resonated with you, know that<br>your journey matters. Be gentle with<br>yourself. Keep exploring and surround<br>yourself with support. If you haven't<br>yet, subscribe and join this community.<br>We're in this together. And before you<br>go,<br>comment. I am healing to affirm your<br>growth. You are seen. You are valued.<br>And you are not alone.