Explore new ways of being in relationship with your adult child, in this lively conversation with best-selling author Gabor Maté and his son, award-winning musician Daniel Maté.
Show Notes
On the heels of the arduous and rewarding process of writing a book together, Gabor and Daniel talk with Cali Alpert, Omega's digital media director, about the only relationship where one partner is completely responsible for the other. “No relationship starts off so entirely unequal, moves toward equality, then back toward dependence, all the while demanding mutual respect,” Gabor says. Also, Daniel adds, there’s really no blueprint for how it’s supposed to be.
Sharing snippets from their own sometimes thorny relationship, the men discuss how, as adults, we have to negotiate unresolved hurts, misunderstandings, and issues that can come in the way of our natural connection.
Daniel reflects on how we all can get comfortable in “stuck” habits. Perhaps instead we can begin to wonder, he says, how else could this relationship be?
This episode is part of Season 4 of Omega’s award-winning podcast, Dropping In. Join us for intimate conversations with some of Omega's trailblazing spiritual teachers, thought leaders, and social visionaries, to explore the many ways to awaken the best in the human spirit.
Sharing snippets from their own sometimes thorny relationship, the men discuss how, as adults, we have to negotiate unresolved hurts, misunderstandings, and issues that can come in the way of our natural connection.
Daniel reflects on how we all can get comfortable in “stuck” habits. Perhaps instead we can begin to wonder, he says, how else could this relationship be?
This episode is part of Season 4 of Omega’s award-winning podcast, Dropping In. Join us for intimate conversations with some of Omega's trailblazing spiritual teachers, thought leaders, and social visionaries, to explore the many ways to awaken the best in the human spirit.
Creators & Guests
Guest
What is Dropping In (Audio)?
Join Emmy award-winning producer and Omega director of digital media Cali Alpert for Season 4, as she drops in for intimate conversations with some of Omega's trailblazing spiritual teachers, thought leaders, and social visionaries, to explore ways to awaken the best in the human spirit. New episodes will be posted weekly.
Cali Alpert:
Welcome to Dropping In, from Omega Institute, a podcast that explores the many ways to awaken the best in the human spirit. I'm Cali Alpert. Dropping in today, Dr. Gabor and Daniel Maté. Gabor is a retired physician, bestselling author, and internationally renowned speaker, highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship between stress and illness. For his groundbreaking medical work, he was awarded the Order of Canada, his country's highest civilian distinction. His latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, is co-authored with his son Daniel, as is their next book, Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents & Their Adult Children. Daniel is an award-winning songwriter, playwright, and educator. He received the Edward Kleban Prize for Most Promising Lyricist in American Musical Theater, and the ASCAP Foundation's Cole Porter Award for Excellence in Music and Lyrics.
Outside of music and theater, Daniel runs the world's only mental chiropractic service called, Take a Walk With Daniel. His passion is helping people crystallize their own innate freedom, clarity, creativity, and true intelligence by discovering what alignment means for them. So Gabor and Daniel, thank you so much for dropping in today. I'm so happy to see the both of you. It's a pleasure to meet you both.
Daniel Maté:
Thanks so much for having us.
Cali Alpert:
First I'd like to start with the overall concept of the adult parent relationship and why it's so unique and why it's so challenging. Gabor, let's start with you.
Gabor Maté:
Well, it's unique because no other relationship starts off so entirely unequally, and then is meant to become at some point an equal relationship between two mature adults. As a matter of fact, it's the only relationship that begins with one partner being 100% responsible for taking care of the other, and towards the end of life, perhaps, that second person now becomes the caretaker, and all that while they have to negotiate unresolved hurts and misunderstandings and issues that come in the way of the natural connection between those two partners. So there's no relationship that starts off so unequally, move towards equality, and then perhaps in a certain sense, move towards inequality again, in terms of caretaking responsibility, all the while demanding mutual respect.
Cali Alpert:
What's the term? The expression, the child becomes parent to the man?
Daniel Maté:
The child is the father of the man. Well, I take that to mean, in some ways, that who we are as children governs in many ways who we become as adults, but there's certainly also some adult parent, child relationships where there's been a role reversal and the children have been parenting the parents for a long time, but that's a whole other thing.
I would just add to what Gabor said, that it's also unlike other relationships in a few other ways, there's really no blueprint for how it's supposed to be. We don't need each other in adulthood in the same way that we did, which is why many people live perfectly well estranged from their parents or their adult children. Now, there may be grief about that. There may be a tremendous sense of loss. Some people are more blase about it. But the fact is, once the equality, the parity has been reached developmentally, what nature intends is that the adult child can take care of themselves and that the parent stops parenting, as a verb. They don't stop being a parent.
We see this, I think, reflected in the fact that, I don't know if we're the only ones talking about this, but it certainly is a niche that we are able to fill. If you go into any bookstore, look at the parenting section. How many shelves of books upon books are there about parenting from conception to college drop off? And then there's also books about the end of life, saying goodbye to your dying parents. Then there's a few books about recovering from the narcissistic abuse your parents gave you. But what about just the general course of things, all of those decades in between, what are we supposed to do with them? So that was a curiosity I think for both of us that set us going down this path of exploring it.
Cali Alpert:
What was behind the curiosity?
Gabor Maté:
Sheer misery. We had a lot of-
Daniel Maté:
Not sheer misery.
Gabor Maté:
I'm exaggerating, of course.
Daniel Maté:
Mitigated misery.
Gabor Maté:
Mitigated, sheer misery.
Daniel Maté:
Intermittent.
Gabor Maté:
We've had a lot of issues in our relationship, and it was actually somebody associated with Omega who at some point suggested to us that we might want to do a workshop about this. And we did. And those people, like yourself, who've watched the video of us talking on the evening of our first event, you see the misery right on stage, along with a whole lot of great stuff and communication and respect and so on. The fundamental dynamic or motive was our own particular stuff, but the dynamics are hardly unique to us. So they're fairly universal.
Cali Alpert:
So going back to your reference to the challenge and tension of your relationship in your earlier years, and you're the eldest of three kids in your family, Daniel, so you were the first one for your parents to experience-
Daniel Maté:
I was the trial balloon.
Cali Alpert:
You were the trial what?
Daniel Maté:
Trial balloon.
Cali Alpert:
Trial balloon?
Daniel Maté:
Yeah.
Cali Alpert:
Do you recall who came to the awareness that there were issues to work out first, especially given your work historically, Gabor?
Gabor Maté:
Well, I came to the realization that in many ways I had hurt my children, but that realization didn't necessarily lead me to approach the relationship very wisely. In fact, in the beginning when I came to those realizations, it triggered a lot of guilt in me. So I approached my kids from a point of the guilty parent who, oh my God, I did all these things, but also from the point of view of not trying to fix them. They didn't want me to fix them. So I may have come to the realization first, but that doesn't mean that it gave me immediate access to how to deal with it. That took a whole other learning to understand how to relate to them as adults.
Daniel Maté:
On the other hand, when I was five years old, I drew a picture of three dinosaurs, two large imposing dinosaurs roaring and one little dinosaur crying. The caption was, is this the proper way to treat a child? So I knew something was off in our relationship and I was trying to communicate it.
Then throughout my teen years and into my 20s, my own emergent emotions about it started coming up. I was becoming a songwriter, so I was writing songs and I found that I was writing about my parents quite a bit. I was always attracted to music that expressed some of the emotions I was feeling. But again, just because I was aware of that doesn't mean that it led me to approach repairing it in the most productive way, nor did I necessarily imagine that repair was possible. I think this is the ultimate, it is what it is relationship for many people. They just assume that it's baked. Once it's done, it's done, and you're going to live with it more or less for the rest of your life.
It hasn't been until, maybe, really, when we started doing the workshop that we consciously took on, maybe not only can we try to heal or remedy the past, which you actually can't do, you can heal or remedy your relationship to it, but what if we focused on what would it take right now to really enjoy each other and ourselves and to have some new kinds of conversations?
Cali Alpert:
People hearing this might think that that's an ultimate irony given your work and expertise in trauma and bridge building, among many other topics inside of your specialties. I wonder if that means sometimes in these families, it's that classic healer, heal thy self thing? Is it easier or harder? You have the tools and you're equipped in certain ways, but does it make it harder to penetrate it when it's happening under your own roof?
Gabor Maté:
It made it harder in the sense that I would approach my kids the same way as I approach people who came to me for healing. But my kids don't come to me for healing. They come to me for relationship. So if I show up as the "healer," I'm purely polluting the relationship with something that doesn't belong there. So they used to just resist and resent that, justifiably.
As for me, it's one of those issues that used to trouble me quite a bit, that I can help the whole world and I can't help my own kids. But that's part of the point of the learning here, is that our adult kids don't want us to show up in a particular role. They just want us to show up. I had some trouble learning how to do that.
Daniel Maté:
Or go away sometimes.
Gabor Maté:
Or to go away sometimes. Yeah.
Daniel Maté:
To know when the time is right.
Gabor Maté:
As the case may be. Yeah.
Daniel Maté:
From this end, one of the difficult... look, I get messages from people all the time, especially now that the book's out, genuinely expressing a wish, a very fond wish, that their parents would've been as conscious and aware of trauma dynamics and as gentle and as compassionate and as wise, when it comes to stuff, as my father. I can completely understand that, and in many ways, I'm very, very fortunate and blessed that there is a vocabulary, at least, in this family, and some kind of invitation to have that conversation.
At the same time, the vocabulary preceded the shifts in being, and the shifts in awareness and behavior in the moment, which created in me a real wariness, because you're talking the talk, but I don't feel it. I can't feel it. That didn't transform anything. It just entrenched a sense of not being safe because I can't-
Gabor Maté:
And it's confusing, right?
Daniel Maté:
It's completely confusing, and it makes me want to have nothing to do with any talk of healing, or trauma, or anything like that. Or mindfulness. Whatever my dad would recommend to me to help ameliorate my various kinds of woe in my adulthood, like reading Eckhart Tolle or something. It just like, "No, that's your thing. Stop trying to change me or fix me." Which I'm sure was not what he would have wanted me to take from them.
Gabor Maté:
One of my children came to a workshop I gave once, and they watched me work the whole day with the participants, and at the end of the day they came to me with tears of rage saying, "You're such a guru to all these people. Why can't you be like this at home?"
Cali Alpert:
What did you do with that after you felt that that night?
Gabor Maté:
Oh, I totally understood what they said. I totally got it. I totally got it. They were right.
Cali Alpert:
It speaks perhaps to the idea of when you know things intellectually versus when you embody them?
Daniel Maté:
Oh, 100%. One thing I'm finding, the more I progress in this work and the more I do my so-called mental chiropractic work with people... Are you okay, Father?
Gabor Maté:
I'm fine. I've just got this... my speaker's cough.
Daniel Maté:
That was me being loving.
Gabor Maté:
Oh. Oh, okay.
Daniel Maté:
Well, it was half joking.
Gabor Maté:
I thought you actually were asking. Maybe you were actually asking?
Daniel Maté:
Yeah.
Gabor Maté:
Okay.
Daniel Maté:
I was just laying it on a little thick.
Gabor Maté:
I thought you were joking.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah. I was half joking.
Gabor Maté:
Okay, that's it. I'm walking out. This interview is over.
Daniel Maté:
You can't take a joke. You could never take a joke.
Well, when it comes to what's the difference, how do you get across that finish line from knowing something intellectually to embodying it? It's all well and good to say, "Okay, I need to embody it." But how do you do that? The more we do this work together, and the more I work with people in my "mental chiropractic practice," which is completely made up by the way, I'm not a chiropractor, it's just a metaphor, the more I find that intention is really the key to get over that hurdle, because you have to make it important enough to embody it. If something is important to you, you prioritize it, and you ignore other things. If you have to get across town because a loved one is in a fire and you need to save their life or wake them up to get them out of the house, well, if you get an email on the way, or even if someone tries to get your attention, you automatically go where the intention is.
We actually get comfortable in these stuck habits, and there are payoffs to them that we can examine if we want to be honest about it. So what it takes is actually getting sick and tired of the same old, same old, and then wondering how else could it be?
Cali Alpert:
Gabor, do you think that everybody has the ability to, I'm going to use the word shift, because that's what I'm getting from what Daniel said?
Daniel Maté:
It's a great word for it.
Cali Alpert:
Do you think that everybody has the ability to shift to the degree that they can do better bridge building inside of their dynamics with their parents and kids?
Gabor Maté:
Well, let me make a distinction between capacity and ability, okay? Capacity is the inner resources, or the possibility. Ability is a bit more specific. It means can they actually do it? Are they able to do it?
Daniel Maté:
Right now.
Gabor Maté:
Yeah. That depends a lot on circumstances. What kind of guidance they get. What kind of support they may have. What are their internal emotional atmospheres like at the moment? What is their intention? What possibility are they aware of? So, yeah, I think we all have the capacity in the sense of potential. Ability? That takes some doing to get to the point of being able.
Daniel Maté:
Well, what's the synonym for ability? Is skill. We are talking about building new skills. And know that you don't build any skill without practice, intentional practice. I don't accidentally become a trumpet player. I don't accidentally learn how to grout tile.
Gabor Maté:
Does this explain why I can't play the trumpet?
Daniel Maté:
Yeah.
Gabor Maté:
Okay, now I understand.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gabor Maté:
Thanks.
Daniel Maté:
It's not entirely your fault.
Gabor Maté:
Okay, that's Good.
Cali Alpert:
Absolution from your son.
Gabor Maté:
That's great.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah. If you did, we could do a concert together.
Gabor Maté:
That's right, yeah. We could do Shostakovich's Trumpet and Piano Concerto actually.
Daniel Maté:
Oh, wow.
Gabor Maté:
It's a wonderful piece.
Daniel Maté:
I was thinking more Chet Baker and Oscar Peterson or something.
Gabor Maté:
That too.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah.
Cali Alpert:
These are interesting new amalgams of talent you're putting together. I appreciate it.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think we were meant to write books together and that's about it. And lead workshops.
Cali Alpert:
I think there's probably plenty of people that would listen to this conversation and this type of offering and find it enviable that there are parents and children in this world that are able to even attempt to even have this conversation and even to have this language, because there's so many that can't. So what do you say to people when one person is in that dynamic and is not capable for a variety of different reasons that I'm sure you can name?
Gabor Maté:
Is that, we both have learned, I think, that it's not 50/50, it's 100%/100%. In other words, I can make a shift with internal to myself whether or not the other person comes along, that changes the relationship, at least changes my experience with the relationship. So it doesn't depend on the other person.
Now, it's also the case, that if I make this shift, if I make myself 100% responsible, not for the relationship, but for my relationship to the relationship, if I make myself 100% responsible for that, very often, and if I transform and embody the shift, as you guys are saying, that other partner will almost automatically shift even without intention. But whether they do or not, if I change my relationship to the relationship, my experience is going to be completely different. So fortunately, ideally, of course, it's great if both partners are intentionally involved, but it doesn't require that ultimately. That's the good news.
Daniel Maté:
There's a special thing going on in this relationship too, and I'll just talk about it in one direction. I'm sure it's true in the other, but I'll speak from experience. When you're dealing with this person, when you're an adult child dealing with your parent, we are wired to be interpersonally, biologically affected by each other. We have a chapter in our new book, the Myth of Normal, called You Rattle My Brain, taken from the Jerry Lee Lewis song, you shake my nerves and you rattle my brain. We really do.
Now, when I'm trying to have a relationship, say with a spouse, my earliest childhood traumas might get triggered. I'm going to react to them as if they are my parent and I'm a little child. That's one degree of separation. When I'm dealing with this guy, his is the nervous system that conditioned mine, and it's the same nervous system. Several decades down the road obviously our cells have regenerated in many ways, we're not the same people, but he's got the same voice. He looks the same to me because I didn't notice the passage of time. So doing the time warp again, as I like to say, is so much easier to fall into that pitfall-
Gabor Maté:
Of going back to the past.
Daniel Maté:
... of going back to the past. Which means it takes an extreme amount of consciousness and intention and probably a lot of muck ups along the way, because the past is going to get you for a while, and you have to, I think, make room for. This dynamic is so deep. This is the first person you encountered when you came into this world. They're the one who set the parameters for how life occurs to me. How life seems to you. What the world is. So to retrain the nervous system, and especially if you take into account everything that his work shows and his colleagues like Bessel and Peter Levine and all that. Well then, it's actually a heroic thing to try to reconfigure that in adulthood, especially when we're living in a time and a society when the parent/child relationship is so often and so endemically fractured from the start.
Gabor Maté:
Which by the way, I think, thanks to leading to that, we have to just broaden the perspective here from the individual parent to individual child. Parenting relationship also happens in a context, and that context is the culture. When you look at how human beings evolved, for most of our existence and species that preceded us as humans, and in the existence of our own species, parents are not nearly in the uniquely responsible position of raising the child under such conditions of stress and isolation. We evolved and spent most of our evolutionary and post evolutionary in the presence of our own species existence, as hunter gatherers in small bands, where parenting was a communal task. Way too much responsibility and too much stress is based on parents today.
So we have to at least understand that this is not about blaming anybody or guilting anybody. It's almost impossible in this culture to be the parent that kids really need. It's not impossible, very, very difficult. In many ways, to be a good parent in this society, you have to resist the culture, as opposed to the culture being there to support you, here it actually, actively intervenes and undermines you. So that needs to be understood in this conversation.
Cali Alpert:
That's so much grace also to grant to parents-
Gabor Maté:
Oh, yeah.
Cali Alpert:
... especially these days, just to be reminded-
Daniel Maté:
Oh, they need it.
Cali Alpert:
... of that.
Daniel Maté:
They need all the grace they can get.
Cali Alpert:
Yeah.
Gabor Maté:
We do address that issue very much in The Myth of Normal. We quote James Garbarino, who's a professor of human development, and he says, "We have to really understand how difficult it is to parent in a toxic environment." He wrote that in the 1990s, and it's so much more toxic now.
Cali Alpert:
Little did everybody know.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah. There's going to be a lot of adult children around out there saying, "Well, okay, but I don't want to let them off the hook." It's got nothing to do with letting them off the hook. First of all, you're the one who's on the hook when you're holding onto the resentment, number one. But that will be the case sometimes for a while. You have that anger and your experience of your childhood is made no less acute or excruciating-
Gabor Maté:
Or raw.
Daniel Maté:
... or raw, or traumatizing, nor the ripple effects throughout your life up until this moment, all of the relational havoc, everything you're carrying physically and mentally. Not to blame it on your parents, but again, your body and mind was forged in the crucible of your parents' container, and conscious and unconscious.
Gabor Maté:
Conscious and unconscious, yeah.
Cali Alpert:
Metaphorically and literally.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah, right?
Cali Alpert:
Yeah.
Daniel Maté:
It's like both, and. When we started this Hello Again project, one of my latent, actually explicit fears, was that at some point I was going to have to just be like, "Oh, well, parents do their best," and just sell out on the authentic working through of my grievances. That I was going to have to make a moral... like there was a statute of limitations or something. Now, ideally there would be, but you actually have to reckon with them honestly.
Gabor Maté:
Do you mean griefs or grievances?
Daniel Maté:
Well, the griefs that are underneath the grievances, as is always the case. Sometimes grievances take a while to pop open like a clam shell, like an oyster shell, to reveal the more sensitive grief inside.
Gabor Maté:
I would also say that a grievance plays the function of not getting to the grief, of covering the grief.
Cali Alpert:
Defense mechanism.
Gabor Maté:
Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Maté:
It does, but that doesn't mean you can force it open.
Gabor Maté:
You can't.
Daniel Maté:
It needs to be approached with a certain spirit, which sometimes means allowing it for a while. That's the grace parents can give their adult children. If that makes you feel guilty, you deal with your guilt. It's not your child's fault. You've probably been carrying guilt for a long time. They're working through something. It might mean you don't get what you want from them for a while. But when there's an injury, how do you heal it? One of the best things you can do is leave it alone and tend to it lovingly.
Cali Alpert:
And now a word about Omega Teachers Studio. Get ready to be inspired from your very own cushion, yoga mat, or couch. Omega Teachers Studio brings your favorite teachers direct to you, live and online from their studios for one plus hour classes on topics that matter the most. They're easy to fit into your schedule and affordable too. Learn more at eomega.org/studio. To receive a 10% discount on any Teachers Studio tuition, enter the code DI10 when registering. That's the letters D and I and the numbers one and zero. Now, back to our episode.
I'm curious about the relationship both of you have with the other's trauma and wounds. Gabor, your earliest versions of trauma are very public and informed your career. And Daniel, I've heard you talk about being afraid of your father, about rage early on, and feeling a lack of respect. Can each of you speak to your sensitivity toward the other one's wounds before you got deeper into this work?
Gabor Maté:
Well, the thing I want to say about that is that I wish I was able to be present enough when challenged to see the woundedness of my children, or my son, particularly this son, at the moment when the wound is being activated. It's one thing to be aware of it in principle and going back into the past, but we had a public event-
Daniel Maté:
Recently.
Gabor Maté:
... recently here in New York, actually, close to here in New York, where certain stuff happened and I didn't see the woundedness of my son. Instead, I experienced what I interpreted was as an attack and a-
Daniel Maté:
Disrespect.
Gabor Maté:
... lack of respect and so on. So the real skill is actually see the woundedness not as a general principle, the trauma not as a historical fact, but when it's present, not to take it personally and just to be present to the woundedness of the other and to approach it with gentility and gentleness and compassion and openness, and not taking it personally in the present. That's what the greatest challenge for me is.
Daniel Maté:
Yeah, and for the adult child, I grew up hearing the story of my dad's early trauma. The Holocaust is a pretty... it's a pretty out-sized kind of trauma, and one can get desensitized to it, or even enured to it-
Gabor Maté:
Well, excuse me, Daniel. Sorry if I interrupt. Did you grow up listening to it? I don't think I talked about it much when you were kids.
Daniel Maté:
You didn't talk about it, but around, it was an environment. We would, at the Passover table... it wasn't laid on too thick. I'm not saying that. But I was aware of it. And certainly since you've become an author and a speaker, you go back to that, that's your cardinal example. We opened the book with it in many ways. So, one thing that's left me curious about, what are his other traumas? What happened when he was six? What happened when he was 10? What happened when he was 13? Because I can't relate to being given away to a stranger on the street in Budapest in the ghetto when there's Nazis. But I'd like to hear about his pubescence and the awkwardness with girls and things like that.
Cali Alpert:
Are you saying that you haven't?
Daniel Maté:
What's that?
Cali Alpert:
Are you saying you haven't heard about that?
Daniel Maté:
I've found it more difficult to pull out that kind of-
Gabor Maté:
Have you actually asked?
Daniel Maté:
Yeah, I think I have. I would've liked to have not had to. I would've liked there to be more of a, "Hey son, I've been there," rather than, "Hey son, here's what's going on with you."
Gabor Maté:
I don't think you ever asked me about what it was like for me and girls at that age. Not that you should have asked me, but-
Daniel Maté:
Not that I should have had to ask. Some parents have the instinct.
Gabor Maté:
No. No, there's no reason why I should come to you and say, "Here's my experience with girls."
Daniel Maté:
No, no. No, no, no, no, no. Understand what I'm saying. If I come to you in turmoil about what's going on with me. One, I think, strong parenting instinct is guidance.
Gabor Maté:
Uh-huh. Say, "This is what it was-"
Daniel Maté:
Because you've gone before. You've walked this road. So whatever the challenge in life is, whether it's money, or sex, or things like that, I think there's a parenting instinct which gets activated in some parents and not in others. I'm not making you wrong for it at all. I'm telling you what I longed for, to be able to relate to you.
Gabor Maté:
This is something-
Daniel Maté:
Rather than learn from you.
Gabor Maté:
This is something that you are aware of as something that-
Daniel Maté:
More and more aware of as I've gone into adulthood, as something that was missing.
Gabor Maté:
Uh-huh. Okay.
Daniel Maté:
I'm enjoying more and more that I can actually relate to you. But quite aside from that, for the adult child, when you become aware of your parents' early traumas, there can be sometimes a tendency to say, like I said, "Well, does that let them off the hook?" I think what's underneath that is this grievance, "They should have given me what I needed and I don't want to give them excuse for why they didn't."
I think, again, the capacity to hold two things at once. On the one hand, I unequivocally, non-negotiably, needed something and they did not give it to me. Whether I think they withheld it or they just were incap... again, not able, unable, I didn't get it. I have all kinds of emotions around that. Sometimes those emotions are directed towards them on the one hand. On the other hand, they're a person with a history and they came into parenting at a certain time in their young adulthood probably, in my case they'd never been parents.
You can't make the resentment or the grievances go away necessarily overnight. But you can temper them with some awareness and balance them out so that they no longer dominate. I do think an awareness that... you and I, we're speaking about us, but I can say, and I have my mom's permission to talk about that relationship, which also has to be a part of this, because it's not just fathers and sons. Her childhood I can relate to a lot more than his. It's less rarefied. She just grew up in a stressed home with confusing and confused parents who were really doing their best, but had their limitations. I know those people. So that has been something that I can... I can picture that. It's very hard for me to picture what he went through, or to even imagine it. It's unthinkable to me.
Cali Alpert:
That begs a question about relatability, accountability. You're talking about paradox number one, the idea of holding these two spaces of compassion and of a need for attribution or whatever. It's complicated. So there's that piece that you just mentioned. Then there's the piece of relatability and Gabor, I'd like to ask you this, in all due respect, Daniel, of what you just said. Does it matter? Are there other ways to find relatability, just the compassion for your parents' experience or your kids' experience, even if you can't relate to it? Does that help to find your way inside the healing process?
Gabor Maté:
I don't like to prescribe anything to anybody, and prescriptions don't work. So I would never say to anybody, "You should," et cetera, et cetera, because there's no shoulds. What I do find is that the more people heal their own stuff, the more automatically they relate to somebody else's experience-
Daniel Maté:
That's very true.
Gabor Maté:
... and the more automatically they have compassion, and the less grudge they hold. Because grudges come out of the fact that I'm hurt. If I heal, and if I'm less hurt, the past doesn't change, but how I relate to the past and how I relate to the person who was in my past changes. If I'm less hurt, there's less to have a grudge about. Ultimately, if I completely heal, there's nothing to forgive anymore. Because if I completely heal, if I'm whole, then I wasn't damaged, nothing was taken away from me. There's nothing to forgive. So I do think that's what you're asking about. Relatability is a function of healing, not a prescription.
Daniel Maté:
And as a child whose given to grievances, I think that's absolutely true. I think it's borne out by the fact that lately, especially since the book has come out, I haven't wanted as much from you. Something has been completed from you. Now, we did have some eruptions a few months ago, but it's the difference I think, between repair and reparations. An adult child who is incomplete in themselves, secretly is afraid that there's still a child and will always be a child, and that their parent is hiding the key somewhere.
I wrote a song when I was 24 years old that I put on an album that I released and then never distributed because I was a little embarrassed of it. The chorus hook was, "I will not be truly free until you give me time to be my own man." Now, in a sense, there was truth there. It's like I wanted some space. Please understand, please give me some space and grace. On the other hand, there was a demand in there that you pay me back what you didn't give me. And that debt, even if it existed, it could never be repaid because you can't change the past. The more I insist on it, the more the interest accrues, and I'm the one paying it. Resentment is when you drink the poison and want someone else to get sick, that old cliche.
So as I've gotten more complete with my past, which paradoxically enough means getting more viscerally connected to the pain and my experience of the pain, not his reportage of the pain, not the facts of the matter. Because as we all know from the work of a certain Dr. Gabor Maté and others, trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you and how you experienced it, which we often lose touch with, which is the trauma, the fracturing. So as I've done my work to reconnect with the oof, the ouch, the erm, and I nourish myself from that and I see results in my actual life, then I come to him and I don't see someone who's withholding the key from me. I see someone who-
Gabor Maté:
Because there's no key.
Daniel Maté:
Because there is no key. And there are no bars either. I'm already free, I just don't have access to the experience of freedom, so I act like I'm not. That's what responsibility, in a way, looks like. It doesn't mean letting anyone off the hook. It means letting the hook off. Dissolving the hook.
Gabor Maté:
It means there's no hook.
Daniel Maté:
It means there's no hook.
Cali Alpert:
I'd like each of you to answer this question. What do adult children and parents have to lose and have to gain by doing or not doing this work?
Daniel Maté:
Well, what they have to lose is their certainties.
Gabor Maté:
The sense of being right.
Daniel Maté:
It's my turn, Dad.
Gabor Maté:
Okay. Then go ahead.
Daniel Maté:
Their certainties. Their-
Gabor Maté:
Because the last thing I hate to do, I hate to interrupt you.
Daniel Maté:
Yes.
Gabor Maté:
So I'd like you to go on now. I
Daniel Maté:
I appreciate that.
Gabor Maté:
Yeah.
Daniel Maté:
I can tell the joke will continue. There's going to be a third one, right?
Gabor Maté:
Yeah, because I don't want to be the kind of parent that takes away the space from their son when they're talking and all of a sudden the parent... I hate to be that kind of a parent.
Daniel Maté:
Wow.
Gabor Maté:
Yeah.
Daniel Maté:
You're a really great parent. You're so conscientious.
Gabor Maté:
Thank you, child.
Daniel Maté:
I'm so lucky to have you.
Gabor Maté:
Yes, aren't you?
Daniel Maté:
Their certainties and their stories, their narratives, their comfortable narratives, which are not necessarily comfortable, they're not happy, but we become comfortable with them and they give us some kind of dividend, some kind of benefit payoff, a dubious one maybe. But being right is one of them, and avoiding responsibility and things like that. Also, your certainties about what's possible. What you're capable of, your certainties about who you are. Because if your parents aren't who you thought they were, and if your children aren't who you thought they were, then maybe you're not who you thought you were.
Take an adult, like a parent, shifting their view of their child. Well, up until that point, they may be seeing their child as the unfortunate result of all of their mistakes. Which means you see yourself as a perpetrator and a hopelessly broken person, or whatever, whatever it is. Or you might be trying to exculpate yourself, you're saying, "I'm innocent," being all defensive. But if you see your child as like, they're fine. They turned out the way they turned out, you probably filtered out some of the trauma you got as a kid and they're dealing with, and maybe they're even really suffering, but it's their suffering and they're dealing with it. Well then, who you are for yourself can shift in every aspect of your life. So that's the opportunity as well. There are ripple effects to this that I think are unpredictable, that I think even we're still discovering.
Gabor Maté:
What you get to lose is something that we all hold very precious, which is our sense of grievance and being hard done by. I love being hard done by, I mean, not that I love being hard done by, but I default to a position of-
Daniel Maté:
I can arrange to have you harder done by if you like.
Gabor Maté:
I'm sure you could.
Daniel Maté:
I know a guy who knows a guy.
Gabor Maté:
Yeah. So we get to lose that sense of delicious misery. Certainly from the point of view of the parent, what you have to gain is that you get to not erase, but detoxify the past. What happened, happened, but if you have an open, respectful relationship with your adult child in the present moment, that means that whatever you may have been berating yourself for has, in a sense, been corrected or atoned for, or-
Daniel Maté:
Reconciled.
Gabor Maté:
... reconciled. So in a present moment, you're just there in the present moment, not burdened by the past. Not to mention the sheer pleasure of being in interaction with somebody you love so much and always have loved so much, and just having the sheer joy of the interaction.
Cali Alpert:
As we sit here right now, I'd like to ask each of you, Gabor, I'll start with you, how you feel about each other, and potential roadblocks or obstacles that are still a work in progress for the two of you?
Gabor Maté:
Well, Daniel and I have just completed this really arduous process of writing a book together. It took us two and a half years. It was the biggest challenge of my life, and I could not have done it without Daniel. It was a challenge not just in the sense of bringing this material to fruition in the form of a book, but also challenge in working with my son. I have tremendous gratitude today, right now, because I could not have books done without him. Tremendous love for him. Tremendous respect for what he's taught me in the process.
Occasionally, but a lot less, there's still worry in me as to when will I step on the next landmine that's going to blow up in my face in this relationship, and all of a sudden we'll have a scene on our hands, like we did a month ago on a public stage in New York. But-
Daniel Maté:
It wasn't an explosive scene, but it was hostile.
Gabor Maté:
Hey, did you just interrupt me?
Daniel Maté:
Yeah.
Gabor Maté:
Oh, okay.
Daniel Maté:
Guess where I learned it?
Gabor Maté:
But certainly not having seen each other now for about a month since the book launch, and I've been traveling internationally now, but landing in New York last night and then being picked up by Daniel at the airport and then having dinner and then driving here for the two hours from New York. I noticed a real ease, and I commented on this to Daniel, "There's a real ease in our relationship at the moment." I don't want to predict that it's going to last forever, but it's just a really welcome sense of, there's no tension. I'm not worried about what's going to happen next. I'm not walking any eggshells lest I upset my easily terrible son. So I'm just tremendously enjoying the situation is what it is. That's how it is right now. We'll see what it's like tonight, but that's what it is right now. You asked about right now. Right now, that's how it is.
Cali Alpert:
You espouse the importance of present. So you're answering me in the present, right?
Daniel Maté:
Yeah. With a little bit of trepidation for the future. Yeah, I feel tremendous gratitude really to you Dad, for including me in your work, which was already pretty magnificent in terms of its impact and its scope. I've been really enjoying having something of a platform. It's not yours, it's mine, and I'm enjoying that it's not yours, it's mine. I'm feeling more secure... and what was happening just before the book came out is that all my insecurities about it were coming up to be detoxified, really. I was acting them out. It was a little chaotic for me, both in body and mind. I was having all kinds of flareups. But the reality of it actually is I can hold my own. And if I can hold my own, then I can hold my own around him. Then I'm not so concerned with how he's going to show up.
Here's the other thing that I often forget to say. When I actually sort through all of the negative memories and all of the traumatic impacts, what's left are a whole bunch of really lovely memories of the vibe that we're describing now. The ease, the playfulness, the enjoyment of verbal fisticuffs. We used to wrestle together, like physically wrestle. I just loved, he could make me laugh so much. He told me stories. I delighted in his cleverness. He was playful and spontaneous. That was not only occasionally, it's just that the inconsistency of it was the thing that created a wound. But when I can tend to the wounds, then the healthy flesh is also there and I can draw on it to continue and expand that stuff. Now I'm an adult, so it's a different kind of play.
Cali Alpert:
We have three rapid fire questions that I'd like to ask you. We ask all of our guests here on Dropping In. So the first one is, Gabor, if you had one wish to grant our viewers and our listeners, what would you wish for them?
Gabor Maté:
Wake up.
Cali Alpert:
Daniel, what about one wish that you could grant for yourself?
Daniel Maté:
I can't grant the viewers a wish?
Cali Alpert:
If you'd like to.
Daniel Maté:
I would grant the viewers a fresh start at whatever they're sick of. An experience of something new. Not having your worst expectations confirmed. What would I wish for myself? It's kind of banal, but as many more years as possible to enjoy this ride and to see where it goes.
Cali Alpert:
Gabor, would you like to grant yourself a wish?
Gabor Maté:
Yeah. It's that I find the presence that has nothing to do with what I do in the world, that is unconditional and not dependent on activity.
Cali Alpert:
And finally, for either or both of you, what would you like our listeners and viewers to take away? One thing from this conversation, if only one thing today?
Daniel Maté:
What a couple of swell guys.
Gabor Maté:
Yeah. The possibility of depth and learning and transformation is always present.
Daniel Maté:
How it is, is not your fault. How it could be, you have no idea. And saying yes to what is and what could be is worth it. You were about to interrupt me at the worst possible moment.
Gabor Maté:
But I didn't, you notice?
Daniel Maté:
I did.
Gabor Maté:
I didn't interrupt you.
Daniel Maté:
I did notice.
Gabor Maté:
Yeah, great.
Daniel Maté:
Next time I'd rather not have to notice. Sorry, this little [inaudible 00:46:24] act is getting ridiculous.
Gabor Maté:
Okay. That's it. I'm sick of this conversation. It's over.
Cali Alpert:
So finally, if people would like to find you, your separate and collective endeavors, where can they find you?
Daniel Maté:
So separately, I am danielbmaté on the socials. I am at walkwithdaniel.com, for people who want to find out more about what this mental chiropractic thing is. Danielmaté.com, if you want to check out my musical theater stuff. As far as speaking to the collective thing... Oh, he's at drgabormaté.com, and compassionateinquiry.com is his methodology of therapeutic training and self-inquiry. We have a website that's helloagainproject.com. We're going to be updating it soon as we start writing this book. Your Instagram is gabormatémd. Your Twitter is drgabormaté.
Cali Alpert:
Well, Gabor and Daniel, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for making the time today.
Gabor Maté:
Our pleasure as well. Thank you so much.
Daniel Maté:
Will you stop speaking for me, Father?
Gabor Maté:
Okay, my pleasure. He hated it. I loved it.
Daniel Maté:
Well, and mine as well.
Cali Alpert:
Thank you both.
Gabor Maté:
Thank you.
Cali Alpert:
Really, such a gift.
Thanks for dropping in with Omega Institute. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps new listeners find us. If you'd like to see what we look like, watch the video version of Dropping In on Omega's YouTube channel. Dropping In is made possible in part by the support of Omega members. Omega members enjoy a host of beneficial experiences when they donate to help sustain Omega's programming. To learn more, visit eomega.org/membership and check out our many online learning opportunities featuring your favorite teachers and thought leaders at eomega.org/onlinelearning. I'm Cali Alpert, producer and host of Dropping In. Our video editor is Grannell Knox. The music and mix are by Scott Mueller. Thanks for dropping in.