Dr. Gabor Maté: Link Between Your Childhood and Why You’re Addicted to Approval (Transcript)

And all of a sudden you start wondering, whose life am I leading anyway? I certainly went through that, still going through it. 81 years old and still going through a midlife crisis, you know.

JAY SHETTY: See, you’re not too old, Etienne. 26 is all right. You’re doing just fine. You’re doing just fine, Etienne.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: So, but what I’m saying, Jay, is there has to be a questioning there. At some point you have to recognize that it’s not working the way that feels good in the heart or in the gut. So there has to be that recognition. Then there has to be a curiosity.

Now, you’re asking about future generations, but the way we gift future generations is by actually working on ourselves, not by trying to be better parents. But by actually dealing with our own stuff, that’s the way we avoid, as best we can, passing it on to the next generation.

The Belief That We Are Only Valuable When We’re Busy

JAY SHETTY: I think one of the ways the inner critic and that inner voice keeps us imprisoned is that it makes us believe we’re only valuable when we’re busy. We’re only valuable if this, right?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: No, no, wait a minute. Did the guy who just starts a 13-city tour in 2 weeks just ask me that question?

JAY SHETTY: You can’t expose me on my own show, Gabo.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Look, I just — believe me, my wife’s in the audience, and she once said to me, “Buddy, you’ve written a book called ‘When the Body Says No.’ No, you better write one called ‘When the Wife Says No.’ Precisely for the same reason.”

JAY SHETTY: That’s so good. That’s so good. You didn’t answer my question.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Sorry? Sorry, I missed what you said.

JAY SHETTY: No, I was saying, yeah, I mean, me included, we definitely have that belief that I am valuable if — and fill in the blank. It could be I’m only valuable if I’m busy, I’m only valuable if this person says I am, I’m only valuable if I get promoted, I’m only valuable —

DR. GABOR MATÉ: I know, and we do have this idea that we’re only as valuable as how we appear or what we do, but not for who we are. And that again goes back to very early days.

And I’ve often talked about something my friend, the great trauma psychologist pioneer Peter Levine, said. Peter said to me a couple of years ago — and Peter is, I think, a year or two older than I am. He’s done amazing work in the world, one of my mentors. And Peter said, “If I ask myself, have I done enough, the answer is very much yes. But if I ask myself the question, am I enough, I still don’t know the answer.”

And in this society, we’re very much programmed to identify our value with what we do. And it’s very interesting when I talk to people about it, because people will tell me, “I’m only as valuable as what I do.” And then I ask them this question: “Do you value me?” Talking about myself as a human being. And they say, “Yeah, of course.” I say, “Okay, what if, God forbid, tomorrow I’d have a stroke and I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t give anything to anybody. Would you say to me then, ‘Gabo, you’re worthless’?” And they say, “Of course not.” I said, “Then why are you saying it to yourself? Why are you saying to yourself that you’re only as valuable as what you do?”

So there’s this inner concept that I’m only as valuable as what I do or how I show up. There’s a tremendous lack of self-compassion.

Am I Enough?

JAY SHETTY: Wow, that’s — yeah, please give it up. That’s — I’ve never thought about it like that. And the distinction you just made between those two questions — have I done enough? Am I enough?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

JAY SHETTY: How do we learn to give a positive, genuinely true answer to the second one? How do we rewire when the whole world is telling us that what you do is who you are, your title, your followers, your Instagram bio — right? The whole world is telling us that. How do you even begin to remaneuver how the mind is being programmed?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah, well, it’s — I can’t say that I fully worked it out, but two things come to mind when I hear your question. One is, would you say to a 1-day-old baby who can’t do a thing, would you ever say to them or believe about them, “You are not enough”? Of course you wouldn’t. Then why are you saying it to yourself? So that’s the first answer. And then the second answer is, who’s even asking?

The Guilt of Resting

JAY SHETTY: Gabo, on the flip side of feeling like we only have value because we work hard, a lot of us are guilty or feel guilty for resting. If you look at the studies in the United States, high percentages of people don’t use their annual leave, and the annual vacation in the US is far less — I’m hoping in Canada people use their annual leave. Yeah, there you go. And in the UK, we definitely use our annual leave. But there’s that sense that we all still feel a slight guilt for resting. We feel a guilt for taking a break.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: I can totally relate. When I was a busy and workaholic family doctor, literally — and you know, I used to deliver babies and look after pregnant women — I’d feel terrible going on holiday with my family because somebody might give birth without me. You know, it’s like, imagine somebody in the world is born without me. How’s that? How did humanity survive all those millions of years, you know?

But there’s that voice in me that says I’m committed to that patient, I have to be there, and in the sense of guilt that I’m actually looking after myself. That comes from that same belief that we’re not enough unless we’re doing something. That lack of valuation of ourselves just for being.

What Stress Does to the Brain

JAY SHETTY: Yeah, that resonates so strongly, and so many of us are constantly challenged by it. Walk us through what’s actually happening to the brain when we stress ourselves physically or get close to burnout? What’s actually happening to us that we don’t see? The invisible effects. We know that we get tired, we get exhausted, but what’s actually happening inside that we often miss?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, so stress — by the way, we Canadians can be proud of the word stress because actually it was coined right here in Canada. In the way that we use it today.

JAY SHETTY: I didn’t know that.

The Science of Stress and Its Long-Term Effects

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah, I know a lot of people don’t. It was coined by another fellow Hungarian of mine called János Csörhány-Selye, who was a physician and researcher who came to Canada in the early 20th century, just after the First World War, and he did his research on stress at University de Montréal in Montreal.

And he’s the one that showed in the laboratory the impact of stress on diminishing the immune system, overgrowing the adrenal gland, which is the stress gland, and ulcerating the intestines. And he’s the one that— the stress— the word stress wasn’t new, but the way he used it was new. He’s the one who established it internationally.

And the thing about stress is it’s an essential response to life challenges. If you’re confronting a threat, you better have a stress response, which means you’ll have activation of your nervous system in a good way, and it makes you more alert. You’ll have more adrenaline to give you more energy and strength to fight back, more cortisol that gives you more blood sugar to have energy for the challenge ahead. In the long term, that’s a positive and necessary physiological response. Of all animals.

In the long term, those same stress hormones— and this is something that my profession, the medical profession, I only wish would understand and practice more— is that in the long term, those same stress hormones give you high blood pressure, constrict your blood vessels, high risk of strokes and heart disease, thin your bones, so you get osteoporosis, suppress the immune system, or can even turn it against you so you get autoimmune disease, make you depressed, put fat on your belly so that you’re more at risk of heart disease, turn on genes that can cause cancer, turns off genes that can protect you against cancer, and cause inflammation in the body.

So this is what we all bring on ourselves, and people don’t realize how, because they’ve taken on these driven values of this culture, they’re actually literally making themselves sick. And sometimes it takes an illness to wake people up. And I don’t recommend that way of waking up, but my God, it works that way very often.

One of the Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, wrote in a play called Agamemnon, written 2,400 years ago, and he said that the way that the gods created us human beings that we have to suffer into truth. We have to have pain wake us up to reality. And unfortunately, too often it’s these stresses that we impose on ourselves that then create pain, illness, dysfunction, that then wake us up that maybe the way I’m living isn’t the way I’m meant to live.

But I don’t hate it, I regret that that’s how people have to wake up, but it often is. Certainly, I have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the truth. I don’t gravitate there automatically.

Where Are You Not Saying No?

JAY SHETTY: Yeah, well, everyone here is obviously extremely proactive, committed, trying their best. They’re self-aware. They want to do the work. If someone’s sitting there right now and wondering, “Gabor, I notice stress early, I can see it’s getting worse. What do I do? Where do I start? What should I be thinking about doing, changing, shifting if I want to walk out of here tonight and I want to really prioritize this because I don’t want to end up with that long laundry list of pains in my life? What should I do?” What would you say?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, read my books. But actually, I did mention the book I wrote called When the Body Says No, which is the whole point, is that when you don’t say no, the body will say it for you in the form of illness. In my most recent book that we’ve just discussed before, The Myth of Normal, there’s actually a whole chapter on this.

And when I say this, this simple question to the inquiry that you just made for that person, I would say, where in your life are you not saying no? And by that I mean, where is the ‘no’ that wants to be said, but you’re not saying it because you’re afraid of how the world will perceive you? You’re afraid that people will not like you. You’re afraid that people might be disappointed in you. Where is the ‘no’ that your organism wants to say, but you’re not saying it?

Start with that. Where this week did I not say ‘no’? Where today did I not say ‘no’? And that usually happens in two arenas of life: in personal relationships, it happens all the time in personal relationships, and in work, where there is a ‘no’ that wants to be said, but you are not saying it. I guarantee you that the ‘no’ that you are not saying is going to be a source of stress for you. So that is the first question. Other questions follow, but that is the first one. Where am I not saying ‘no’?

JAY SHETTY: That’s a great first question.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

JAY SHETTY: Everyone resonate with that? That idea of where am I not saying no? That resonates so strongly with me because I think you’re spot on. We were talking about that in the first half. We were talking about that inner voice that if you just sit and listen to it, but we’re moving so fast, we’re so busy that that no can be really quiet. And it’s like this little whisper that’s barely getting through.

The Power of Yes and No

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, that small still voice that the Bible talks about, right? And there’s a related question as well, which comes later in the same exercise, you might say, which is, where am I not saying yes? There were times in my life where I had certain creative urges or desires, but I was too busy not saying no that there was no space for me to say yes to what I wanted to say yes to.

So those two questions— where am I not saying no? Excuse me. I just came back from a 12-day speaking trip, so my voice is saying no. I like to see you at the end of this trip. But those two questions, those two little words, yes and no, they’re crucial in people’s lives. They’re small little words in every language. They’re very short little words. You know, German, nein. Hungarian, nem. Russian, nyet. French, non. Really short little words, but they’re just decisive in people’s lives.

And it’s very interesting. Those of you that have been parents, what is the word that your kids start saying at 1.5? No! Put your shoes on. No! As a matter of fact, I had a friend called Harold who had a son called Ben, and we were medical residents at the same time. This is decades ago, it’s like 47 years ago. And Harold, the father, says to his son Ben, who was 2 years old, “Ben, do you want an apple?” And Ben said, “No, I want an apple.”

And what that’s about is nature putting a barrier for the child behind which he can develop his own self. And before your yeses mean anything, you have to be able to say no. And in this society, we call that inner stupidity. We call that the terrible twos. When it’s perfectly natural. So we start with that word and then we stifle it in people. And at age 45, they don’t know how to say no.

JAY SHETTY: It’s so interesting because I feel like our mind convinces us. I don’t know if you are like this as well. Our mind convinces us that I can’t say no.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

JAY SHETTY: Like, oh my God, I just couldn’t. Like, if I, Gabor, if I started doing that, my life would just fall apart. I can’t do it. Like, it’s not possible. And our mind says, oh no, and I can’t say yes to this because. So we almost kind of fool ourselves.

How the World Creates Our Minds

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, we do. And the Buddha said 2,500 years ago, in almost so many words, that with our minds we create the world. Now, if your mind lives in a world where you saying no threatens you, then you’re not going to say no.

Now, what the Buddha didn’t say is that which is more modern psychology, is that before our minds create the world, the world creates our minds. So if you grew up in a family where it wasn’t respected, where it was seen as a sign of disrespect, disobedience, something to be suppressed or punished, and your acceptance depended on your acquiescence, then you will forget how to say no in order to protect yourself. So it starts off as an adaptation.

Sometimes when I give my lectures, I play a song by Elvis Presley. Did you see that wonderful documentary about Presley called The Return of the King? I haven’t seen that one, but okay, it’s wonderful. He goes through this phase where he sings terrible songs, where he gives up on his incredible charismatic energy and talent. And he just becomes a puppet in the hands of his manager.

And then he does this comeback concert, and he shows up on stage dressed like a god in leather clothing, just the most beautiful man on earth, and he sings his raw, raucous, ribald, wonderful rock and roll, and he’s fully himself. But then he gave that up, and he sings this song called ‘Any Way You Want Me, That’s the Way I’ll Be.’ “I’ll be strong as a mountain or weak as a willow tree. I’ll be anything that you want me to be.” And that’s how he ended up living his life. He ended up dying very young in very tragic circumstances. He’s somebody whose raw genius was of world significance and his energy was unbelievable and he gave it all up. And he paid a heavy price.

Compassionate Inquiry: A Live Demonstration

JAY SHETTY: Yeah, those stories, and when we have hindsight, can be so powerful for us. Even if we’re not living that life or whatever it may be, they’re so powerful for us to look back on.

And tonight I wanted to make this an extremely special experience because I want you to know just how deeply grateful I am that you’re here today. And I’ve asked Dr. Gabor as my first guest if he was comfortable leading and guiding an individual who wanted to go through his compassionate inquiry personally in this seat up here tonight. And so if there’s anyone who’s going through something, feels like they’ve been held back, feel like they’ve been challenged, who wants to— before we take questions, would like to go through a process in front of the audience, he’d happily walk you through. So if you want to just raise your hands and I’ll have a look around.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, thanks for coming up. I hope you’re not nervous. There’s only 1,000 strangers watching you. What would you like to talk about?

JAY SHETTY: I’m on your chapter on attunement, and I guess I would love to hear it from your point of view because I think I’m really trying as of this week to stop trying to explain myself and re-find my instinct and listen to my gut. And I would just stop trying to be seen, stop trying to explain myself is something I’m really working on right now and something I want to pass on to my children and would really love to see how that starts. And I think you guys kind of gave a really good intro to that today.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: All right. Thank you. So are you concerned about if you don’t figure this out, that might affect your children somehow? Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s start with the beginning. How old are your kids? You said 1 and 3?

JAY SHETTY: Yes.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: And how old were you when your mother began to work on herself? That’s a tough question. Well, what’s the answer? Probably now. Okay. What would it have meant for you if your mother had begun to work on herself when you were 1 year old? It would have made a big difference. How so?

JAY SHETTY: Um—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: You would know who you were. Yes. You’ve already given that gift to your children. Notice that, okay? Because you’ve already begun that work. You’ve already began to answer those questions, ask those questions. So you got nothing to worry about. That’s the first point. Okay?

The second point is, who’s the one who’s even asking the question? Who’s the one that notices that sometimes you don’t follow your gut, that sometimes you don’t listen to your heart? Who’s the one in you that notices that?

JAY SHETTY: Me.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah, so you’re already here. You say, “I’m trying to be myself.” You don’t have to try anything. It’s already here. You just have to pay more attention to it. Now, that part of you that sees and asks, can you check in with that in your body? What does that feel like in your body?

JAY SHETTY: Peace.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah, peace. But you said it with a kind of a scrunched up face. Peace. Just checking again. I’m not criticizing you. I’m just noticing, like, you’re not quite ready to believe yourself. So check in again. That part of you that notices and is committed to being you, and is committed to helping your children be themselves, how does that part feel like inside you?

JAY SHETTY: Confidence.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Thank you. Now notice how you said that, with absolute confidence. What else do you need to know? Is there anything else you need to know? I’m asking you.

JAY SHETTY: So how do you just be confident?

Compassionate Inquiry: Finding Truth Within

DR. GABOR MATÉ: You just did it. You know what you do? You check in with your body. This thing that I’m doing is called compassionate inquiry. It’s a therapeutic method that I’ve helped to develop, and we teach it internationally online. You can look it up online if you want to, but it’s based on the fundamental belief that there’s nothing wrong with anybody to start with, that everything— for example, you’re disconnecting from your gut feelings— was an adaptation, but that the truth is inside you. And by asking the right questions, the truth will emerge. It’s as simple as that.

And I think the audience has been witnessing that truth emerging from you. Very easily. That’s my sense, unless you’re pretending, which I don’t believe you are. Okay, so just keep asking yourself, where am I not saying no today? If I didn’t pay attention to my gut feelings— not judge yourself for it, I didn’t, I screwed up again— but, huh, I noticed I didn’t pay attention to my gut feeling today in that situation. I wonder why not? What did I believe at the time? So just keep asking yourself. Just keep showing up for yourself, which is what you’re already doing. So I’m telling you, you’re on the right track already, far more than I was at your age, by the way. Okay?

JAY SHETTY: Thank you.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: You’re very welcome. Thanks.

JAY SHETTY: I really love that method, and I hope as you were listening, you were practicing on it on yourself, like I was, right? Because as I was listening in, there was a real sense of just how we constantly think we’re not on the path.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

JAY SHETTY: We constantly think we’re not doing the work. We constantly think that there’s something wrong with us and something broken.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Right.

JAY SHETTY: And you were just saying, actually, that is the challenge, that, you know—

Early Adaptations and the Wisdom of Our Responses

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah. And I’m saying that whether for you or for me or anybody in this audience, whatever you think is wrong with you at some point served a purpose. So for Christina, at some point, disconnecting from her gut feelings served the purpose of being accepted by the people that she had to be accepted by. It wasn’t a mistake, it wasn’t a moral failure, it was an adaptation. The problem is that these early adaptations then become ingrained, and that which was helpful in one situation becomes a limitation in another situation. But asking yourself the right questions will get us back to source.

I finally mentioned I’m wearing this bracelet here, and I was given this in Haida Gwaii, which is— as people in British Columbia know, that it’s a beautiful set of islands in the north of our province where indigenous people have lived for something like 10,000 or 12,000 years. And then it was colonized, and they were treated terribly. And I gave a trauma workshop up there a year and a half ago, and an elderly woman came up to me, and I’ve told this story before— she was so ashamed of herself because she forgot her native tribal national language. And I said, well, what happened to you? And I was given this bracelet at that workshop.

What happened was she went into residential school where indigenous people had to surrender their children to the state and to the church. And she made the mistake of speaking her native tongue, at which point they took a stick and they beat her. Her forgetting her language at that point saved her life. And then she was ashamed. I didn’t fight back. I said, okay, you were 5 years old. Could you escape? No. Could you ask for help? No. What would happen if you fought back? They might have killed me. So not fighting back, what she’s judging herself as cowardice, was actually her organism’s wisdom to save her life.

And what I’m saying is that all these things in ourselves— that’s an extreme example. But all these things in ourselves that we berate ourselves for, judge ourselves for, criticize ourselves for, they began as adaptations. We need to be very kind to ourselves. And that’s why I’m saying compassionate inquiry. There’s a spiritual teacher who says that only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth. Well, that compassion needs to be extended to ourselves. And then we can extend it to others as well.

JAY SHETTY: It’s so powerful for me to hear that from you because I think we’re so good at saying, “Oh God, the last 3 years were just a waste of time, but now I figured it out.” You know, that job that I was in 10 years ago, I should have left it earlier. You know, that relationship— we’re so good at berating, as you said, and just saying, “Oh, that was a waste of time.” And it’s almost like, well, no, no, no. It wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t nice. But it’s aided you. It’s helped you. It’s served you. And you’re so right that—

There Are No Dead Ends

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, you know what? The great German philosopher Nietzsche— he said once that— I’m paraphrasing him, but he said, we talk about these dead ends that we went down. He said, there are no dead ends. We just found out that that wasn’t the way to go. So we didn’t waste any time.

Thomas Edison said he was once asked, what did it feel like to have failed 1,999 times to build a light bulb until you finally got it? And he said, “I didn’t fail 1,999 times to build a light bulb. I found out that there were 1,999 ways not to build a light bulb.” And so much for our dead ends and our mistakes and all these things. We had to do it to find out our reality. That’s all.

JAY SHETTY: Yeah. I wanted to give you all an opportunity this evening to ask questions to Dr. Gabor Maté. As we have him here for the last few moments. If you would like to ask a question, I’m going to come out into the audience and hand you a mic. So raise your hands and I’m going to come and find you.

Even as an adult, in my experience of working with many different people in marketing and business, and when you say no to someone right away, whether you have a reason to, people abruptly shut down. They don’t hear what comes after the no. So what I’ve been doing with my children— I’m also a school counselor, so I talk about diplomatically saying no, saying just that pause moment for you to share your no without saying no right away. What are your thoughts on that?

The High-Quality No

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, Eckhart Tolle, who’s another Vancouver-based teacher, internationally very well known, I’m sure very well known to this audience— he talks about a high-quality no. There is that kind of an automatic, resentful, reactive no, which doesn’t get across. It just creates more resistance. But there’s a high-quality no, where you’re really honoring yourself and you’re not making the other person wrong. You’re just saying, “No, that does not work for me, and I will not do that. And if you can’t accept that, it’s not my problem.” I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s what comes up for me.

JAY SHETTY: Thank you so much.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: And by the way, I thought I heard you say that you had cancer at some point. Well, in my view, that’s one of your body’s ways of saying no, is through illness, and I’ve seen that all the time.

JAY SHETTY: So my question is, as an indigenous person who’s had family that went to residential school, as I get more serious— my partner and I are talking about children. How do I know if I’m healed enough to not pass on that trauma?

Healing Intergenerational Trauma and Reconnecting with Indigenous Wisdom

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, some friends of mine who made a film about my work called The Wisdom of Trauma are just releasing a film this month. It’s called The Eternal Song, and it’s about indigenous wisdom around the world. And they came to Paraguay, they came to northern British Columbia, Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand. They spoke everywhere to indigenous people. And the eternal song, the universal message everywhere is about the importance of learning from the heart. Unity with nature, unity with the whole world.

And when I speak in indigenous communities here in Canada, what I stress is that your own traditions, that they tried to kill in you— one Canadian politician said about the residential schools that the intention is to drive the Indian out of the Indian. So when you ask me how not to pass it on to your kids, I say, first of all, as I’ve said before, working on your own trauma, but also as much as possible connect with that deep wisdom in your own traditions that would be so beneficial not just for your people but for the whole society.

And I think it’s one of the tragedies of modern civilization. I did a speaking tour in Australia. In Australia, there have been indigenous people for 60,000 years, a continuous culture for 60,000 years. Canada is not 200 years old yet. Do you think in 60,000 years they might have learned a few things? Do you think in 60,000 years they over there or your people here might have learned a few things that would be worthwhile for the rest of us to learn?

So what I’m saying respectfully in response to your question is, deal with your traumas, work them through, but also go back to your own wisdom, because there’s so much there that is healing. The unity, the chanting, the drumming, the dancing, the sun dancing, the cedar brushing, the— what do you call it?— the smoke that you— certain plant, you know, the sweat lodges. There’s so much there. So combine modern trauma work with your own traditions, and I think you’ll have the perfect brew. That’s my best advice to you. Thank you.

Balancing Self-Improvement and Self-Acceptance

JAY SHETTY: So I’m just wondering, relating actually to your previous conversation, how does one balance the desire to self-improve and self-acceptance?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: You see some kind of a contradiction between what you call self-improvement and self-acceptance? Can you tell me a bit more about that? What is the contradiction that you’re perceiving there?

JAY SHETTY: The way I see it is, for you to want to improve in the first place, you might see maybe yourself as not enough in some situation or facets.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: And that’s true. If you’re working on self-improvement, you’re making some kind of an accusation against yourself. But how about if you just put the two together as, “How can I reach my full potential?” And ask yourself that question, then there’s no contradiction. “How can I reach my full potential?” And, “What is keeping me from my full potential?” There’s no accusation in that. There’s no self-judgment in that. There’s no self-rejection in that. It just says, “How can I reach my full potential?” And that is a lifelong process. But it’s a beautiful one, and there’s no contradiction in it. I hope that answers your question.

JAY SHETTY: It did.

Overcoming Self-Doubt: Applying Self-Compassion to Yourself

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Thank you so much. Hi, I’ve been on a similar journey kind of as Jay Shetty. I grew into wanting to help people. Since a really young age, I’ve always wanted to just be there for my friends, for my family.

And I think one of the things that have limited me a bit is just feeling too young to help people, to give guidance. I recently started a YouTube channel, and I feel like there’s just a lot of things for me to still learn, and I feel sometimes too young to be spreading out whatever it is that I know. And like what we were talking about earlier, feeling like I’m going to be judged or be looked at as like, what do you know? But I’m 22 years old, so I do feel really, really young still.

And so I guess my question would be, how do I tap into that wisdom that I have without feeling like it’s not enough?

What I heard you say is that you feel that you’re too young, and you have a fear that other people will judge you as too immature, as just not ready to make a contribution. That’s what I heard you say. Okay.

Now, I can think of lots of people at age 22 who were recognized geniuses by the time they were 22. Mozart was one of them. He was composing stuff when he was 11 years old. So age has got nothing to do with it. That’s the first point.

Second point is when you say, “I feel I’m too young,” that’s not a feeling. Feelings are, “I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m sad, I’m angry.” Those are feelings. “I am too young” is not a feeling, it’s a belief. Okay, can you see the distinction?

Okay, if a friend of yours— like at age 22, I was at university and I was writing columns for the student newspaper— would you have come to me and say, “Gabor, you’re just 22, you’re too young to write anything?” Would you have said that to me?

How come you wouldn’t have said that?

I think one of the things that I see is that, like we were talking about earlier too—

Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I’m just asking a simple question. You’re 22 and you’re saying to yourself, “I’m too young.” But you would not have said that to me at age 22. I didn’t have YouTube. There wasn’t YouTube then, but there was a newspaper that I wrote for. Why would you have not said to me, “Gabor, you’re too young to do this?” How come?

JAY SHETTY: Because you’re not me.

Treating Yourself With the Same Compassion You Give Others

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Oh, so there’s different rules for you and me, is that right? No, but I think I would just automatically think that you’re good.

Well, here’s what I’m thinking. Are you willing to apply the same rules to both of us?

Yeah.

Then just apply the same rule to yourself. As a matter of fact, even if a friend of yours who is your age said, “Hey, I got this idea of a YouTube channel. I want to make a contribution and express myself.” Would you say to them, “Hey, you’re too young?”

No.

Okay. So again, notice what I referred to before as the lack of self-compassion. And just notice it. Now, don’t judge yourself for lacking self-compassion. Just notice it. And then make an effort to treat yourself the way that you treat me or anybody else, and you’ll be just fine.

Now, you know what? People may judge you. That’s totally true. That may be true. So what? What’s the headline? Human beings judge other human beings. People judge me all the time. I mean, just go to the YouTube channels where I got all this stuff of mine, and lots of wonderful comments. But some people say, this guy bores me to death.

And one of them, I love this one. Today it was on a political issue that obviously this person didn’t agree with me, but they said Gabor obviously has dementia. Okay, so what? Okay, thank you so much.

Closing Reflections: What Is True for Me?

JAY SHETTY: Hello, Gabor, you have been such a joy and such a treat to have my first ever live interview for the podcast that we’ve ever done. To do it in Vancouver, to do it with you, someone that I genuinely learn so much from every time you speak, every time you share, someone that I’m so grateful to call a friend. We’ve meditated together, we’ve had plenty of conversations together, and I want to ask you one last question before I—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: But before you do, let me just also say that it’s a real honor and a pleasure for me to be invited by you to speak with your audience and to be the first one on this tour to be a guinea pig for you.

JAY SHETTY: We’ve all been guinea pigs tonight.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s right.

JAY SHETTY: Yeah, we’re in it together. But I want to end with one last question I wanted to ask you, which is, if there’s one thought you’d love for people to discuss as they left today, something that they could talk to on the way home with their friend that they came with, their partner, the family member, and if they came alone, something they can start a conversation tomorrow.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah, at work, at home, what would you encourage them to— Yeah, well, I’ll tell you what comes up right away for me is ask yourself this question: what is true for me? What is true for me? Ask yourself that question and keep asking yourself that question. Keep asking that all your life. That’s what comes up.

JAY SHETTY: “What is true for me?”

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah, I love it.

JAY SHETTY: Dr. Gabor Maté, everyone.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Thank you.

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