TEREZUM

I feel that there are times in history when certain books are written and they will put an indelible mark in how people perceive a certain theme. The book of Gabor Maté , done in colaboration with his son, David Maté , is one of these books. I must tell you that I felt the compelling need to take so many notes while reading it because I felt that I was like a miner discovering a gold vein. You know what makes this book great? The fact that the author himself admits how his trauma affected his own kids, marriage and life.

The book is about how some of the principles of this society make us sick and why we have so many diseases and issues ranging from autoimune illnesses to rasism, psychedelics, suicide and autism. We need to learn the language of what trauma is and we need to address the elephant in the room.

The book talks about our toxic culture, where consumption and addiction are actually encouraged because it brings profit for certain individuals. Our toxic culture has become a norm and it is making us sick. We are lonelier and more depressed than ever while on a technological level we have advanced so much that we look at our ancestors as being less than us. In fact, ancient wisdom has a lot to teach us in regards to parenting, social bonding and connection.

Gabor states an old truth: within us there has always been an ancient battle between authenticity and attachment. Do we choose to be ourselves and risk to be alienated or do we push down parts of ourselves just to be liked and survive? Imagine a baby trying to adapt and earn the parent’s love. Without even being aware, the baby loses parts of his authentic self in order to survive. Not being liked by your parent is emotional death to a child. I am sorry to be the messenger of an old cliché , but I must tell you that the parenting that you received as a child ( or lack thereof) is responsible for much of your adult issues. The emotional nurturing your father and mother (especially your mother) gave you might have made you or break you as a human being. There is solid scientific research linked to the development of the human brain in connection with the type of caregiving it has received and the effects last a lifetime and maybet the attachment theory sounds familiar to you and why we develop certain styles. Gabor peals the onion of trauma layer by layer and it is soul touching.

There are many valuable informations in the book regarding the effects of stress: it shrinks the lengh of our telomers, shortening our life span. Having a stressful job is worse than having no job at all and contrary to many beliefs there is also such a thing as paternal depression , which is linked to the child’s later developmental issues.

Is there salvation from a culture where children are addicted to screens almost if not more than adults? Is there hope for understanding the fact that bearing a child is more than just a woman’s project, that it should be an entire’s community care? Can we change the way doctors interview their pacients and change medicine in order to integrate the fact that the disease is more than a diagnosis, that it is about the pacient’s life history, trauma, childhood adversity?

There is hope. Here Gabor Maté comes with a new concept: Compassionate inquiry. It invites us to make this weekly exercise where we put ourselves some questions in order to get back to our true self and shed the façade that we have been putting on for years. I invite you to read the book and extract the golden questions for yourself.

There are also four principles that the author recommends for healing, called the 4A: authenticity ( accepting who we are and showing it), autonomy ( assuming responsibility for the situation that we are in and realizing that we have the choice to choose who and how we want to be in life), anger (there is healthy anger that shows that our boundaries have been crossed and it is very good to express it and to learn to say no), acceptance (letting things be as they are, accepting can also mean accepting how difficult it is to accept – I rolled my eyes at this for sure because we all know the turmoil that comes with not accepting things, people, as they are).

At the end of the book there is fascinating information about the benefits of using psychedelics in treating of trauma. Do not go now in the psilocybin pantry as this must be done under a specialist’s supervision. Gabor had an extraordinary ayahuasca experience and I must tell you that I can see why so many people have reaped the benefits of this, maybe in the future this will be integrated in the health system. Who knows, times surely evolve!

My conclusion after reading this book is that we need to question why we do the things we do as we do it. Because we need to stop and look around us and see reality for what it is for the majority of the population on this Planet: traumatic. This book will enter into your soul and lights will turn on in rooms that you kept very dark….