Article XVIV — The Mind-Body Connection: What Trauma Teaches Us About Illness — Dr. Gabor Mate
In the realm of child development, I just wish we’d actually looked at the evidence, but we don’t.
I worked in family practice for 32 years—12 of them with hardcore drug addicts, and the other 20 in a straightforward family practice. During those years, I found that the people who got sick and the people who didn’t get sick followed certain patterns.
There is one major source of illness, and I’m talking about any kind of illness, whether that’s so-called mental illness or physical illness, and that source is childhood trauma.
Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. Things can happen inside you for which you don’t need very dramatic events.
Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, or instability can lead to short-term physiological and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity.
Because those early coping patterns are meant to be temporary states. If you are familiar with my ideas about ADHD, which I’ve been diagnosed with myself, it’s a coping mechanism of young infants. When there is stress around them and they can’t escape, fight back, or change the situation, they tune out as a way of coping.
But when that pattern gets wired into their brain, it goes from being a temporary state, which is what it is meant to be, to becoming a long-term trait.
There’s nothing wrong with coping that way if you could simply drop it once you no longer needed it. But, of course, that’s not how it works. These coping mechanisms are unconscious. Therefore, they’re not chosen deliberately, and they cannot be released deliberately either. We’re not even aware of them.
The reason these patterns make you ill is because, as traditional medicinal practices have always shown, you can’t actually separate the mind from the body—except in medical school, but not in real life.
Now, Western medicine looks at disease from a particular perspective, and you have to understand something about medicine. It’s science, all right, but it’s also ideology. And there’s a difference between science and ideology.
An ideology is a worldview that you’re not conscious of. It consists of hidden beliefs that you don’t question, and it exists in all realms, whether science, politics, history, economics, or any field of human thought and investigation.
So there are always ideological biases hidden in any system.
Now, what are the biases of Western medicine?
The hidden biases are:
- Diseases either have physical causes, such as genes or external forces like bacteria, viruses, or toxins, or they are what we call “idiopathic,” meaning we don’t know their source. One bias, therefore, is that causes are viewed as purely physical.
- The second bias is that diseases happen to organs.
So you have heart disease, lung disease, diseases of the connective tissue, liver disease, and so on. Then there are specialties dedicated to studying these organs in depth.
We separate the organ from the whole person. We might acknowledge the role of the physical environment, but we certainly do not acknowledge the role of the social environment.
I could clearly and trivially change your physiology in a split second. I would simply have to utter a piercing, blood-curdling scream and brandish a weapon at you, and your physiology would instantly change.
Your hormonal glands would start behaving differently. Your intestines would stop digesting. More blood would flow to your muscles, and you would be prepared for fight or flight.
That’s an obvious example of emotion changing physiology in a split second. But guess what? That process goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The interaction between physiology and emotions is constant. It’s just that, for the most part, we are not aware of it unless it becomes dramatic.
In general, the role of emotions is to invite in what is nurturing, welcome, and healthy, and to keep out what is unwelcome, dangerous, and toxic.
With some people, we’ll seek even greater proximity. With others, we never want to be anywhere near them. That’s the job of emotions: to maintain those boundaries.
Your conflicts, your difficulties, and the problematic situations in your life are not random or haphazard. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else.
That part of you that loves you more than anything else invites you to learn.
We can look at psychological problems, relationship conflicts, and illness as problems to get rid of, or we can look upon them as opportunities for learning, development, and growth.
You don’t say to somebody who has just been diagnosed with cancer, “Hey, great! This is a wonderful teaching moment.”
But if somebody wants to learn, if they start asking why, illness can become a powerful teacher.
Contrary to what much of my profession believes—that diseases have a life of their own, separate from the individual—they do not.
They are processes occurring inside people, and people have the responsibility and the ability to affect those processes once they understand them and begin to let go of the automatic patterns that have been driving them.