The Wisdom of Trauma (2021) Movie Script

Our earliest experiences

being in the womb

form the template of

who we believe we are,

about how we see other people,

and our place in the world.

When I see human faces, I see beauty,

I see tremendous suffering

and enormous potential for transcendence.

A Greek playwright wrote

that the Gods created us

human beings so that we

have to suffer into truth.

Our job as human beings is to learn

from our suffering.

We don't have to keep

perpetuating pain for ourselves

and inflicting suffering onto others.

In working with so many other people,

I've learned that working

through trauma can teach us so much wisdom

and can reveal the

beauty of our existence,

that because of trauma,

you had lost sight of.

My name is Gabor Mate and

I'm a retired medical doctor

and these days I travel the world speaking

and teaching about child

development, health,

illness, stress and trauma.

And speaking about trauma is really part

of the zeitgeist these days.

And I'm very passionate

about it for a simple reason:

because in 30 years or

more of medical practice

and of addiction medicine,

what I found was that the common template

for virtually all

afflictions, mental illness,

physical disease is in fact trauma.

And there's a wisdom in trauma

when we realize that our

traumatic responses and imprints

are not ourselves and that

we can work them through

and thus become ourselves.

Virtually every week there's a study

that more and more people are needing

or seeking help for mental health issues.

More and more youth are

diagnosed with anxiety,

many more kids are diagnosed

with the whole plethora

of childhood conditions, such as ADHD,

(Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder).

Depression is rising,

youth suicide is rising,

addictions are rising.

Genuinely, it's an epidemic.

20% of youth or more are

now diagnosable with anxiety

according to all the recent studies.

That's one-fifth.

And those are all only people

who are sufficiently

anxious to be diagnosed.

We're talking about an epidemic.

- When you grew up in a

circumstance like I grew up,

you're waiting for

somebody to scream at you,

you're waiting for something to be thrown,

you don't know if you're going to eat,

you don't know if you're

going to be evicted.

So you're constantly anxious and stressed.

I used to think this was a rarity

but when I talked to people,

a huge number of people have

these traumatic experiences

as a child that carry,

they carry with them.

It's like a monkey on your back.

- Trauma is an overwhelming threat

that you don't how to deal with.

So trauma is not the bad

things that happen to you,

but what happens inside you

as a result of what happens to you.

- My father was shot and

killed on December 25th, 1999.

They found his body in

someone's front yard.

So essentially I didn't

have anybody to raise me.

So I was raised in the

juvenile court system.

I've lived on the streets

since I was 10-years-old by myself.

The law didn't scare me.

I mean, they could have locked me up,

I mean what's the difference?

Nobody out here is gonna miss me.

- My mother, alcoholic. Bad alcoholic.

My father, sex addiction.

His sex addiction ruined our whole family.

Cheating. Caused divorce.

I started heroin at 26.

That's what really destroyed me.

It just takes the pain away.

I tried building my dream so many times.

I don't really have a dream no more.

- So trauma fundamentally means

a disconnection from self.

Why do we get disconnected?

Because it's too painful to be ourselves.

That then becomes a lifelong dynamic.

I no longer know how

to deal with emotions.

It means that in relationships

when I feel a bit hurt,

I immediately withdraw

so I don't have to feel

those emotions that I

don't know what to do with.

So there's a disconnect.

It also means that when

I have a gut feelings,

I don't follow them.

So I create situations of risk for myself.

The trauma also affects

how our brains develop.

Certain key brain circuits

that have to do with

how we react and respond

and regulate ourselves,

how we handle stress, how we

interact with other people,

how much empathy and insight we have,

how much compassion we have.

These functions of the mid-frontal cortex

are limited and constricted by trauma

because we now know

that the brain develops

in interaction with the environment.

So the brains of traumatized children

don't look like the brains

of non-traumatized children.

- You can take it, please.

- I've had enough of your crap.

You're gonna start acting like a young man

instead of a toddler.

- As a matter of fact,

her ass is on punishment right now

and she ain't even gonna

go the fuck back outside.

- What the fuck are you doing?

Dad, I swear to god.

- No, no, wait.

- There's no other way for

you to learn this.

- Dad.

Please, stop.

- During your first 18 years of life,

if a parent or other

adult in the household

often or very often would swear at you,

insult you, put you down or humiliate you,

step inside the circle.

If a parent or other

adult in the household

often pushed, grabbed, slapped

or threw something at you,

step inside the circle.

If a parent or other

adult in the household

often or very often ever hit you so hard

that you had marks or were

injured, step inside the circle.

If you often felt that no

one in your family loved you,

step inside the circle.

Step inside the circle.

I think society got prison wrong

and they're seeing

what's wrong with people

instead of what happened to people.

Our mission at Compassion Prison Project

is to transform communities and prisons

with compassionate action.

An adverse childhood

experience is a terrible event

that continues to happen to a child.

And there's no way to know

when it's gonna happen again,

which puts the kid into

a hypervigilant state.

I have eight of those

aces, and when I found out

I have eight adverse childhood experiences

and that my behavior was a direct result

of the trauma that I

experienced in childhood,

it changed my life.

Men and women in prison, 64% of them

have six or more of those.

- Hi. Gabor.

- Monique.

- Monique?

Hi, Gabor.

I feel like I'm in a throne.

I wanna talk to you guys about why

you think you got addicted,

about what may have

happened to you as a child,

the way you saw yourself as

being deficient, somehow.

- I was kidnapped at 16 and sold off.

So that's a trauma and

that's just something that's

in my life that you

can't turn around, right?

- Kidnapped by whom?

- It was a taxi driver who

took me and a girlfriend

when we were 16.

- Okay.

- And held us

for six months in a motel

and sold off my virginity.

- And the police was looking

for you all that time, and...

- Well, my mom just thought

that I had run away from home,

so she didn't look for me.

- She didn't look for you?

- No.

- I really need your permission to

continue or not to continue.

- It's okay.

I give my permission.

- The taxi driver knew

exactly who to kidnap.

The predator can always tell

who is without protection.

Anybody hit you as a child?

- Yes, my father.

He would spank us and take a belt to us.

- Do you remember how that felt to you?

- Like I just remember the pain of it,

instead of thinking, oh, why?

Why did I deserve this?

I just remember the pain and the...

- And how long did that go on for?

- Well until I was approximately 16

and started fighting back.

- So, 10 or 11 years?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

Let's say you're the

mother of the five-year-old

and this five-year-old

is being hit with a belt,

and she's in pain.

She doesn't understand, you know,

she's just, it just hurts.

And it hurts emotionally

because this man who is supposed

to love me is beating me.

So when you're being hit like that,

there's only two possibilities.

My father is a bad person or hates me

or I'm a bad person.

So the only protection is to believe that,

oh, I'm not lovable.

Let's say you're the mother

of the five-year-old.

Who would you want that

five-year-old to talk to?

- Myself.

- Okay. Who did you talk to?

- Nobody.

- That's the trauma.

In other words, by the time

you were five-years-old,

you were completely alone.

What I'm suggesting really, Alicia,

is that your mother was traumatized, too.

Do you know anything about her childhood?

- Well, she was abused as a child as well

from an alcoholic father.

- See, she learned in her childhood

not to pay attention to her feelings.

That's the only way she could survive.

- Yeah.

- So the reason she didn't know it

was not because she didn't love you,

but because she herself

was shut down inside.

And that's what I'm saying,

it's multi-generational

- Mm-hm.

- Okay?

- It sucks.

- Yeah.

You can't pick out who's at fault here.

It didn't begin with anybody.

It goes on and on and on from

one generation to the next.

- We were talking about

the effects of slavery

on our behavior, and

I'll be honest with you,

I ain't agree with it

when I first heard it.

But then when he talked

about the discipline

I had a flashback of how

I used to get whipped

with a bullwhip.

Naked.

I hadn't put the two and two together,

but I realized, that's

how slaves were whipped,

because it was generational trauma

passed on from one

mother to another mother

to another mother and

then passed on to me.

I still got marks on my

legs and stuff behind that.

And I just remembered there

was no one I could run to.

No one that would help me.

And she just was telling

me how much she loved me

as she cried and she

beat me with a bullwhip.

- He's the best-selling

author of four books

published in 12 languages

sold on five continents.

Please welcome Dr. Gabor Mate.

- I actually wrote my speech out tonight,

which I don't usually do

but maybe of nervousness

in front of this group of strong women.

The truth is that guys

are afraid of women.

I don't know if you

realize that, but that's,

a lot of the stuff that we

do is totally out of fear.

Well,

When you felt bad as a

kid, who did you speak to?

When the pain is there and

there's no one to share it with,

and the child's got

very limited resources,

to deal with that, and what they do

is they disconnect from themselves.

When you disconnect from yourself,

you no longer have yourself.

You've lost yourself.

When we talk about trauma,

we usually think of something

terrible happening to a person

but that's not the only trauma there is.

As the other kind of trauma may not

have to do with terrible

things happening to you.

- Most people look at my childhood

and they're like: damn, you had an awesome

childhood, and because I had everything.

I come from upper, upper middle

class, you know, in Idaho,

and I got everything given to me,

but that was their way of parenting.

They'd give me everything.

So I'd shut up and wouldn't bug them.

They were too busy, they

were always working.

- So children don't get

traumatized because they get hurt.

Children get traumatized because

they're alone with the hurt.

- I'm a lifer inmate.

I'm here on a first degree murder.

I committed my crime

when I was 20-years-old.

And I asked myself what events in my life

brought me to the point

where I could think

that it's okay to take a human life?

And it had to do with a lot of

adverse childhood experiences.

My main one as to why I

started going downhill

was being abandoned by my father.

I looked up to him.

I wanted to be just like my dad.

He was my hero.

When I turned eight or nine-years-old,

he got deported to Mexico,

and that devastated me.

As a kid, my mom used to tell me,

Mi hijo, pray to God

that he will come back,

but he never came.

- A baby that you don't

pick up will actually die.

Even if you feed them and you change them

and look after them,

because they get overwhelmed

by their feelings

and they get over stressed.

And so the baby needs the

mother's and the father's brain

to regulate her own brain,

to regulate her emotions.

It's not just that you're overwhelmed.

It's also there's nobody

there to hold you.

There's a huge school of

thought in North America

that teaches mothers to

help their babies sleep

by ignoring their crying.

Nevermind the mother's milk,

the infant just wants to attach,

because the only way the infant

can attach is physically.

When he's not being held, he's

not being attached to them.

When that's done night

after night after night,

that's traumatic. And we're still telling

mothers to do that.

If you actually look

at genuine human needs,

if you connect the gut and

the heart and the soul,

then there's nothing more normal

than a child sleeping

in the arms of a parent.

So I've often thought about

the sources of my own issues.

An infant two months of age in Hungary,

when the Germans, the Nazis,

marched into the country

and they began to exterminate

the Jewish population.

So that was my first year of life,

with a terrorized mother,

grandparents killed in Auschwitz,

a father away in forced labor,

antisemitism, the ever nearing

shadow of annihilation,

and ultimately a

separation from my mother.

I was a little short of one-year-old

when my mother had to

hand me to a stranger

in the ghetto of Budapest

and send me away to some

relatives in hiding,

so we didn't see each other for six weeks,

and she didn't know if

she would live or not.

In her diary she said: "this was

the hardest six weeks of her life."

That was the experience of the first

nearly year and a half of my life.

And sometimes I thought, well, gee,

I must have received a lot

of love at the same time

otherwise I'd be a lot more

crazy than I actually am.

For trauma to happen,

you don't need second World

War and you don't need racism,

you don't need genocide,

and you don't need the privations of war.

You just need parents who are so alienated

from their own gut

feelings that they will let

their infants cry without picking them up

and that child is desperate

for a relationship.

That's all it takes.

- Well, hi.

- Hi Alison.

- Welcome.

- Hi, Gabor.

- Welcome, Gabor.

- Wow.

What a view.

- Thank you.

For me being a drug addict,

the deep down need to escape,

I think it's almost into

a more realistic place

than the insanity that we see,

the chaos we see around us.

I just wanted that place all the time.

I can really talk for the

37 years I've been recovered

and have had slips in

the program, quote, AA.

- And what's the fear?

- Well, the fear is I'll be abandoned.

It's back with the homo sapiens,

I'll be thrown out of the cave.

- What is your fear of being abandoned?

- Well naturally that I'll die

unless I do all of the

stuff for other people.

- When you do all

the stuff for the people,

- Mm-hm.

- what are you doing to yourself?

- I'm abandoning me.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- So you're actually enacting

your worst fear.

- Mm-hm.

I was the youngest of five,

very ambitious family,

very successful, except

everyone's an alcoholic.

I go in the bar, they're drinking.

There's no room for me.

It's like, oh, shut up Alison, shut up.

You're wrong. You're wrong.

So my job was to be wrong in the family.

I'll never forget my mother saying to me:

"I just don't understand you!"

And I was six-years-old and I thought,

my god, if you don't

understand me, I'm lost.

- Allow me to give you

another perception of you.

You're the one that more than others

absorbs all the pain and

stress in the family.

And then you manifest it and

they can't stand seeing it.

So in exiling you, they're exiling

their own pain and stress.

- Right, right.

- As a child, we have

two fundamental needs.

One need that's with us since infancy,

and it's absolute and it's

not negotiable is attachment.

And so the other need

then is authenticity.

Authenticity, therefore, is

the connection to ourselves,

because without authenticity,

without a connection to our gut feelings,

just how long do you

survive out there in nature?

So authenticity is not some new age,

pseudo-spiritual concept.

It's actually a survival necessity.

What happens if in order to survive

or to adjust to your environment,

you have to suppress your gut feelings,

you have to suppress your authenticity?

So normal society does not allow anger,

and the child who's

angry must be separated.

In other words, we have to threaten

his attachment to relationships,

on which is life depends

so that he can suppress his emotions.

Well that child, if he

learns the lesson well,

will disconnect from their anger,

and then he's a sitting

duck for depression,

mental illness or for physical illness.

Okay, so kid is angry,

but how about helping him

move through the anger to

learn how to modulate it?

Not to repress it, but to learn

to become friends with it.

We don't want people that are not angry.

We want people to know that anger

doesn't have to be destructive.

What were you pushing down

when you were depressed?

- Anger.

- Right.

You were pushing down-

- Rage.

- You were pushing down your anger, right?

- Yeah.

- Can you see how

why for a six-year-old

it might be a really brilliant

idea to push down the rage?

- Yeah.

- Why?

- For survival.

- Exactly.

You talked about your many failures.

I just want you to pick one.

- The fear if left on my

own, I won't get out of bed.

I've done that before.

- And you regard

that as a failure?

- Falling apart I

regard that as a failure.

- You regard that as a failure?

- Right.

- Okay.

So your failure is that you got depressed

and as you put it, you fell apart.

Is that the failure?

- Yeah.

- Just identify the age that you

first recall being depressed then.

- Probably about six or seven.

- How old are your kids now?

My oldest daughter is 33,

my son is 30 and my

youngest daughter's 27.

- Okay.

Choose one as a thought

experiment right now,

and I want you to imagine

them at age seven.

- Mm-hm.

- Let's say they get depressed.

Would you go to them and

say: "You are total failure?"

- Of course not.

- Why not?

Notice you're calling yourself a failure?

I'm going to say something radical to you.

- Okay.

- The depression was a major success,

not a failure.

Okay? Now I know that

sounds ridiculous, but-

- No, no. I'm listening.

You're telling me that having that pain

showed me deeper inside of myself,

how I was abandoning myself.

- Precisely.

So maybe you want to stop

calling it a failure.

- Mm-hm.

- You go through

your whole life like that

and see how everything that

you judge about yourself

actually served the purpose at the time.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hm.

- Really, isn't it simple?

- It is simple.

- Gabor Mate, thanks very much

for coming on Under the Skin.

The reason I'm so excited to talk to you,

the reason that I believe

you're having such

an important cultural

impact is because of your

rare compassion and insight

into the world of addiction.

When it was heroin, I would like have,

I would reflect. Well, after

I'd used and just go, right,

this isn't for me, this has got to stop.

This is not a sustainable system.

- You think you'd never need it anymore

'cause you feel complete.

- Mm.

- And then comes the

remorse of what have I done?

And then you say I don't need

to do to this ever again.

And then by the time I'm home,

I'm running back to the store again

to get the next thing that I didn't buy.

In the life of every person

who's ever been addicted

and ever will be addicted,

there's always trauma.

An addiction is any behavior

that a person finds

relief in the short term

and craves but suffers

negative consequences

and cannot give it up.

There are so many addictions.

Could be drugs, obviously,

alcohol, nicotine.

Could also be sex, could be gambling,

could be shopping, could be eating,

could be pornography,

could be the internet,

could be gaming, could be

work, could be relationships.

That's what an addiction is.

First issue is not why the addiction

but why the pain?

In our society there are

two myths around addiction.

The pernicious line is the belief

that addiction is a choice

and that the decisions

that arise out of addictions

are therefore a matter of

individual culpability.

And so therefore addicts for the most part

are punished for being addicted.

Now the other belief around addiction,

but still misleading, is that

it's an inherited disease,

it's a biological disorder of the brain.

That belief is more humane,

much more than the choice belief,

because at least if

somebody inherits a disease,

they're not to be punished for it

but they are to be provided

with treatment as with any disease.

However, it's also

misleading because it ignores

why people really get addicted,

which has got nothing to do with disease.

It's among the normal

human responses to trauma.

When people are suffering,

they want to escape their suffering.

That's normal.

- My name is Tuta Ponchiao Chi.

I'm 43-years-old.

I come from a family of

Thai restaurant owners.

I moved away when I was 14.

I was never good enough.

I mean, I think if I had

parents who didn't really care

and was lenient, no, I

don't think I would have

really got right into it

and really got addicted.

I might've just, you know,

tried it once or twice,

but I think the pressure

was on from the upbringing

and having to feel like I had to achieve

and be the best of what

I did, an A student.

And so when I moved away,

I really wanted to prove

not just myself but to them that I was

more than what they saw.

You know, I did apply

to Stanford University.

That was my number one choice.

I was disappointed I didn't get in.

And San Francisco State

University was my second choice

and while there I did do the same things

that I was doing when

I was in high school,

playing for the NCWA, singing choir.

With doing so many things,

pledging sororities

and doing, being different club members,

I'm saying I was just trying

to find my way in the world.

And then I started to work

at the nightclubs here.

And so I think that's

when I really evolved

because I wanted to do everything.

I wanted to go to school,

I wanted to work, but I

needed to do homework as well.

So the pressure was on then.

So then it got into heavier drugs,

so I needed the meth to stay up.

- I think our society just

doesn't understand addiction.

Without the addiction,

they felt incomplete,

they felt this huge emptiness inside.

It's as if the addiction

was to complete themselves,

and to somehow temporarily

cover up the emptiness.

Why the finger-pointing, why the judgments

on a particular group of

people who are addicted

who happen to use substances?

My first job that I ever had

as a physician in Vancouver

after I did my internship was actually

in the downtown east side of Vancouver.

It's North America's most concentrated

and most dramatic area of drug use

where there's more people injecting

and ingesting and inhaling

all kinds of substances

than anywhere else in the planet.

And I go this old, broken down hotel

with cracking paint on the walls

and there's strange

people walking in and out,

and I felt totally at home right away.

And after two years, I

shifted my full-time work

to the downtown east side.

So I worked there for 12 years.

They all had suffered

tremendous torment as children,

which also meant that their

addictions were extreme.

They were quite willing

to sacrifice love, life,

relationship, health

just for the next hit.

They were that desperate

to escape from reality

because reality had been so cruel to them.

We were dealing with people

with severe infections.

They would inject drugs.

That would give them abscesses,

not only in their skin or their muscles,

but also in their brains,

in their spinal cord, in their joints.

So they have to be hospitalized,

which is the only facility

where you can deliver

IV antibiotics several times a day.

But they were users, so there'd be

always absconding from the hospital

and even using the IV

lines to inject through.

So inevitably they would

be kicked out of hospital,

which means that their

life-threatening infections

would be untreated.

This is how I met Joey Carter.

I think I pushed him

across an intersection once

in his wheelchair, maybe

that's the first time

we actually met.

- And you helped me out and

you said, what are you doing?

Enough's enough.

I'm going to admit you to CTC-R,

are you going to go there?

And I was like, well,

what about my addiction?

And then you said, well,

what are you using?

And I said, well, I've been

using morphine and m-eslon.

I said, how many will you give me a day?

You said as many as you

have in your pocket.

- By meeting people where they're at

and treating them like human beings

and not trying to change them

actually opens up the possibility

of transformation for them.

And Joey's a plain example.

- 'Cause they had come

in like every four hours

to give me my morphine.

- Yeah.

- And I wasn't needing it.

I was saving it, right.

And I woke up and there is

like morphine all over the bed

and I thought it was in heaven.

- I do recall your poetry,

and you were a very, a very avid writer.

- Yeah.

- And you've shared some of that with me.

Is there one that, you know,

that you can recite now?

- Yeah.

It goes

I misbehave when I crave to

push the venom in my veins.

I lose all control of my inner soul

and my demons hold the reins.

I deceive whoever believes,

I twist their open trust.

With nefarious precision

and tunnel vision,

I pursue the venom with lust.

With the desire so strong,

I forget all bonds

hurting the ones I adore,

And even though they love

me, they move on from me

to let me fight my war.

Uncontrollable, I'm inconsolable,

slowly I'm dying inside.

A glutton of such, I've used too much,

now there's no life in my eyes.

- Wow.

I wanna talk to you guys

about why you think you got addicted?

Like, what did it do for

you in the short term

that you wanted it,

like you appreciated it?

- The one thing that I've learned

was gratification through sex.

It would pay my rent,

it would pay my food,

it would pay my clothes.

But it was also feeling loved.

- Feeling loved? Like...

- Having that desire for

somebody to care and-

- And want you.

- Want you.

- I wouldn't be able to

have a sexual relationship

if I wasn't using, because

I couldn't feel anything

towards the other person.

- It made you feel more alive?

- Yeah. It made me feel more in tune.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, like that's...

And I used it to have feelings.

- I didn't feel pretty,

I didn't feel like...

And as soon as I would

do a little bit of drugs,

my self-esteem would instantly go up.

- I did so much sports and

was on such a strict schedule

that when I started to

use in like grade eight,

grade nine, like, I was free.

- So freedom.

Sense of aliveness.

Completion. Self-esteem.

These are all wonderful

things, aren't they?

When they talk about

addiction being a bad choice,

I say no, it isn't.

It's actually a solution to a problem.

If we understand that the addiction

is not the primary problem,

but really a response to trauma,

then it becomes obvious that

in order to heal addiction,

you have to heal the trauma.

But it means that you see the wound

that's driving that person.

Underneath that traumatized persona,

there's the healthy

individual who has never

found expression in this life

because they were never given

the venue for expression,

never given the relationships,

in which they could, their all

authentic humanity could be expressed.

Are we free? Are we conscious?

Are we making a decision

based on full awareness

or are we driven by unconscious dynamics

that we've inherited or that we developed

as a response to childhood trauma?

Well, insofar as we're not

conscious, we are not free.

We have then a social

structure that induces trauma

in a lot of people,

therefore it induces escapist,

addictive behaviors in a lot of people,

and those inner trends line up

with how society looks

like on the outside.

So therefore all this

looks perfectly normal

and perfectly natural.

Fundamentally the message

is that with our minds

we create the world.

So if I have a worldview that

the world is a horrible place,

then I'm going to live in a world where

I have to be aggressive,

suspicious, competitive

and make myself as big as possible

so I don't get eaten up.

So I have to be grandiose and cunning

because that's the world I'm living in.

And these are the people that our society

rewards with power.

- Do you think that the

inability of these individuals

to manifest real change is a demonstration

that what we have are deeply entrenched

and traumatized systems

that are predicated

on unconscious choices, unconscious drives

and that the system cannot and will not

alter itself from within

itself, but will sustain itself,

and it's only sort of new,

radical ideas that can alter it?

- That's exactly what I'm saying.

Large segments of the economy survive

because people buy things that

give them temporary pleasure

but do them no good

whatsoever in the long-term,

in fact are even harmful.

I mean, we're going so far

as to destroy the earth

because of our addiction.

The disconnect from the body of the earth

really has to do with the

disconnect from our own bodies.

The two are together.

And the exploitation of the earth

as if it was something separate from us

has a lot to do with

patriarchal domination.

I mean, we talk about mother earth.

Look what we're doing to mother.

It's a mother hatred almost.

It speaks to a blindness and a passivity

which itself is a marker of

societal and collective trauma.

Our schools are full of kids

with learning difficulties,

mental health issues

that are trauma-based,

but the average teacher never gets

a single lecture on trauma.

They're fundamentally working with

an essential lack of information.

I actually barely mentioned

the criminal justice system

has no understanding or even acquaintance

with the concept of trauma.

In fact, they often create policies

that further deepen people's trauma.

That these institutions

need to be informed

of what trauma is and

how to respond to it.

- I went between custodies of different

states and counties...

Since 18.

I struggled with addiction

and they were sending me

to these places to get

the help that you needed.

I had nothing but the

authorities telling me

that it was my fault, my fault, my fault,

because you're choosing this, you know

and I can't keep choosing it.

And you're supposed to trust

and believe in these people.

California industrialized prison.

- Trauma doesn't know of color,

trauma doesn't know of age,

trauma doesn't know a tax bracket,

trauma doesn't know any of these things.

Anybody can be traumatizing anybody.

Symptoms of trauma:

nightmares and night terrors.

- Inability to love.

- Addictive behavior.

- Insomnia.

- Depression.

- Shame.

- That's not who you are,

but it's a symptom of being traumatized,

and we're here to heal each other.

We heal in community.

When I do these circles with anybody,

when they see the extent of

childhood trauma in themselves,

but also in the people

around them, it's a shift.

It takes the othering out. It

actually brings a human in.

And that, as a society,

is one of the imperatives

that we need to get to.

We gotta start seeing each other

for what happened to us and

not what's wrong with us.

- My name is Romie Nottage.

I am the senior director of San Francisco

and social innovation for

Downtown Streets Team,

and that is changing the lives of people

who are currently homeless

through the dignity of work.

Labeling people as just drug addicts,

like, it's deeper than that.

They probably at a younger

age have been reinforced

that their value is not

as significant as others.

The pain is the root cause of people

trying to feel comfortable in this world.

Using street drugs is a method.

It is a behavior to support

something that is uncomfortable.

- I was homeless for about 15 years.

It is a survival of the fittest.

I had three kids on the

street while homeless,

walking around, no shoes,

selling drugs, doing drugs,

hoping they would miscarry.

All the babies came out with everything.

Meth, crystal, cocaine,

everything you could think of.

I did utilize those three moments in time

where I had those babies to just rest up

in a nice place and eat a hot meal.

Just basically took a

shower those three times,

'cause while I was homeless,

most of us don't shower.

Maybe once a year, if that.

But I was lucky I had the same

foster mom, all three boys.

Albert, Jetson and James are all thriving.

They're very healthy.

I did fight for them. Don't get me wrong.

I did try to fight for them,

but I wasn't ready to

give up the drug life.

- It was fall, so it was the rain season.

I just remember that constant worry

about where was I gonna go that night?

Would I find shelter?

'Cause there's no where to go, right?

The people that did love

me just said you know what?

We're not going to stand by

anymore while you kill yourself.

We can't do it.

It's hurting more.

We're dying a harder death than you are.

And they just scattered from my life.

I was utterly alone.

- I've been in the city on the streets now

for four years.

Went to college on my GI bill.

I was in the army for a total of 11 years,

then I got diagnosed with

non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

and I retired.

My PTSD comes from experiences with

trying to beat this monkey

on my back, you know?

I've had a beautiful home and vehicles

and wife and kids and thrown

it all away for drugs.

- So when you pass by someone

homeless on the street,

that is such a painful world to live in,

and a very important thing

to do is acknowledge them

and not pretending or literally thinking

that no one's sitting right there.

How are you doing?

Hanging in there?

Had a rough sleep last night?

You stay in the TL?

- I do.

- Yeah, cool. How long have you been here?

- I moved here from

Atlanta February the 7th.

- The number one thing that people

who are experiencing

homelessness suffer from

is feeling looked down on.

It's like people just passing by them,

not acknowledging their experience.

That forms an identity

that is internalized.

Their sense of self has been attacked.

Their dignity has been

completely reinforced

as non-existent every single day.

Humanization of homelessness

is where we need to start

because we're working with people,

we're working with nervous systems,

we are working with deflated

and traumatized senses of self.

To be honest, if I lived in that world,

I would want to use, too.

It'd get me out of it.

It'd make me feel not

like that for a minute.

- Hey, Duane, you home?

It's Tessa.

Hey, how are you?

- Hi, how are you?

- I'm Tessa.

I'm a harm reduction specialist

at Abode Housing Services.

I help people move through

the pain of their addiction

and regain dignity.

So, oh my gosh, your place looks amazing.

I took this job because of

the harm reduction approach,

where people get housing.

You don't have an agenda.

You must do this or that

in order to access housing,

you're worthy of housing because

housing should be a right.

When people get housed

after they've been outdoors

for seven, 15, 25 years,

whatever the number is,

you're alone.

You don't have survival to do,

so this is when I'm starting to see

everybody's pain start surfacing

and people are starting to have, you know,

more challenges and emotional challenges

than they did out on the streets.

Dr. Gabor Mate, when

I found his teachings,

and specifically The

Realm of the Hungry Ghost

kind of changed my outlook in life.

I'm very dear to this work.

- I'm Gabor's wife and I have

been for close to 50 years.

I met Gabor in October of 1967

when I was a first year student at UBC.

I saw in the student

newspaper that they were

looking for cartoonists and I draw.

I walked into the small

room and he's sitting there

reading a book and I said:

"My name's Rae.

I'm supposed to draw you.

Would you mind just sitting there?"

This is it.

I did this before I knew who he was,

before I'd had a conversation.

What a mysterious guy.

Dark, you know?

Intense.

He was so interesting to me.

- I've always been a rebel.

I mean, in communist

Hungary, in grade six,

my teacher wrote in my report card that:

you should watch it because

he incites the other students.

But so that tendency to

resist arbitrariness,

what I'm being told and

what the official line is.

So I'm really not one for group-think,

and it really helps me

to see through all kinds

of nonsense that people

accept without questioning.

On a personal level, I'm

also a contradiction.

My longing is really a

sense of being excluded

from something, and a

sense of impossibility,

and I very easily go there.

I mean, that is my baseline.

- Very early in my meeting with Gabor,

I saw clearly the light that he was

and the dark that he was.

So I saw brilliance and I saw real,

I guess trauma is the word I'd use now,

but I didn't know then.

To me it was dark.

And of course, by then I knew he was,

directly had been in the Holocaust,

but it was going to be my job to heal him,

to bring out that light.

I really believe that

the purpose of marriage

is to actually go back

to the original trauma,

which comes from the family.

I married a man who was

so much like my father.

- My scientific interest as well

has been having to deal with my own trauma

because in my 40s, I was a

very successful physician

and I was a national columnist

for a Canadian newspaper,

and I was the head of the

palliative care department

at a major Canadian hospital,

and I was depressed and alienated,

in a difficult marriage,

and my children were scared of me

and I didn't like being alive.

- Well, there's just

nothing more frustrating

to be in a situation, to see him out there

doing this amazing work, just

the healing and the wisdom

and the support, and then come home

and be completely exhausted, irritable.

And then I get the negativity.

I have to be me, I have to be authentic.

My nervous system is so wired

that if I'm not authentic

to myself, I'm sick.

I have a stomach ache.

I can't sleep.

I'm anxious.

And it's usually here.

It's usually something in this dynamic.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- When I would compulsively

shop for compact discs

and lie about it.

Rae would get neck aches.

And after a while she figured

out if I got a neck ache,

this guy is lying to me.

- He doesn't get away with anything.

- Yeah.

- How are you, Gabor Mate,

not processing your trauma?

- How am I not processing it?

- Yeah, because like,

if you are not doing it,

that's like Steve Jobs going:

"I couldn't get my phone to work."

- That's another traumatized

person, by the way,

whose cancer is everything to do with

the childhood trauma that he experienced,

but that's another book and another story.

- So you sort of are a

bit like in the Matrix,

when Neo sees everything's

made out of numbers,

you look at people and you see

all their trauma and damage?

- That's what I see.

Until I realized that I was traumatized,

which really wasn't until

my late 30s and mid-40s,

and began to realize that it

didn't have to be this way,

that there were reasons for it,

and I started looking for those reasons.

So I started waking up

fairly late in life.

I was a driven, workaholic doctor.

Now why was a driven workaholic doctor?

Because the message I got as an infant

is that the world didn't want me.

Now how do you deal with not being wanted?

You make yourself needed.

So if you're traumatized

and if you don't think you're lovable,

my god, go to medical school.

Now they're going to

want you all the time.

When they're dying,

when they're being born,

every moment in between,

and that's highly addictive,

because you get the

validation all the time.

A lot of people that go into medicine

the last thing they want is

to be open and vulnerable.

In fact, what they want is the authority

of the white coat and the stethoscope.

And medical school is very hard on people.

You might look at it almost

as a selection process that weeds out

the people that are too vulnerable.

The long hours, the deference

to unreasonable authority,

the stress that you are

willing to subject yourself to,

and these are the people that,

like me, become physicians.

So that selects out

against the vulnerable.

I went to medical school here at UBC.

At that time, we did not get

a single lecture of trauma.

We did not even hear the word.

They still don't hear the

word trauma in medical school.

So I've looked at the whole

range of human experience

from birth to death because

I've worked in obstetrics

and I've worked in palliative care

and everything else in between.

The modern medical paradigm in practice

separates mind from the body

and it separates the individual

from the environment.

So when you look at, there's an epidemic

of asthma right now in North America,

more and more people, kids

are being diagnosed with it,

it's all about, or largely about,

the increasing stress in our society.

So it's a cultural manifestation,

and this is completely

missing in medical practice.

If you look at Black Americans,

Black Americans are more

likely to get prostate cancer

and more likely to die of it,

and not because of a lack of medical care.

Maybe there's something

about being a minority

in this particular culture

that is so highly stressful

that it deranges the immune system.

If you look at the asthmatic

Afro-American woman,

is that asthma a manifestation

of her own pathology?

Or is it reflecting a social malaise?

Which means the emotion,

whatever you've experienced,

probably suppressed rage or shame,

whatever you experience,

actually affects the

physiology of your lungs.

Medicine is very interesting that way.

If you go to a dermatologist

with an inflamed skin,

what kind of cream are

they going to give you?

Anybody know?

Steroid cream, right.

If you go to a rheumatologist

with an inflamed joint,

what medication are

they going to give you?

Steroids very often.

If you go to a lung

specialist with asthma,

what kind of inhaler are you going to get?

Steroid.

If you go to a gastroenterologist

with an inflamed intestines,

what kind of medication are you gonna get?

Steroids.

Now, what are steroids?

They're copies of cortisol.

What is cortisol?

The stress hormone.

We're treating everything

with stress hormones.

Maybe it should occur to us

that stress has something to do

with the onset of these conditions.

The fundamental problem is capitalism,

or I should say materialism.

As long as the research

is driven by the profits

of pharmaceutical companies,

what's going to drive the

education of physicians

except the profit motive of

pharmaceutical companies?

I mean, it's just obvious.

People have to be seen as automatons,

as beings without really emotional needs

or spiritual needs.

As globalization and

globalized materialism

spreads throughout the world,

so there's auto immune disease

spreading throughout the world

in societies that hardly

even knew them before.

Diseases, whether mental or physical,

are normal responses to

abnormal circumstances,

and what would be considered normal

in this society is often actually insane.

In the most health obsessed

humans society ever,

all is not well.

In the US, the richest society in history,

fully half of the citizens

have a chronic disorder

such as high blood pressure or diabetes.

Illness is when part of an organism,

starts working against the overall benefit

of the organism.

So that say, in an autoimmune disease,

the immune system attacks

the host organism.

So a system that was designed

by nature to protect you

now it turns against you.

Cell division, which is

meant to be coordination

with the needs of the entire organism,

gets out of hand and

now you've got cancer.

The search is always to find out

what's wrong with the individual cell,

or how do you kill the abnormal cells?

So the treatment is restricted

to the biological plane.

We either cut it out or we

poison it or we burn it.

That's our approach to treating cancer.

Most chronic illness is a

way of the body saying no

when the person suppress their no's

in order to fit in.

I'm saying that when

the illness comes along,

we can just look upon it

as a nuisance to get rid of

and an enemy to fight,

or we can say, okay, well, it's here now.

What's the teaching?

Which it doesn't mean that

we don't accept treatment

or we don't do our best to heal,

but that, as part of that healing process,

we actually ask ourselves

what does this mean about

my life and my relationships

and particularly about how I treat myself?

What is the teaching?

- My name is Tim.

I'm 51-years-old.

I was given a diagnosis of prostate cancer

about a year and a half ago.

I actually had a full,

radical prostatectomy,

so that means the whole

removal of my prostate

which was no walk in the park.

It's quite a, quite an extensive surgery.

In October they did a bone scan

and found that there was multiple areas

in my spine, ribs and some pelvis

that the cancer had metastasized to,

which was devastating to me at the time.

There was no need for me

to have the operation.

If someone has prostate cancer

and they have the prostate removed

but the cancer is still in their body,

then the surgery hasn't done any good.

There was no root cause

analysis of why I got it.

What I soon discovered was

that everything was a band-aid.

- The average general practitioner

under the insurance programs

gets to see a person for 6 minutes

and a psychiatrist gets to

see them for 10 minutes.

What can you do in 10 minutes?

You can adjust medications.

And the average psychiatrist today

is not trained in psychotherapy.

They are trained in what's

called biological psychiatry

which fundamentally means

altering the biology

of the brain by handing out prescriptions,

which never get to the

heart of the problem.

So while I'm not dogmatically

opposed to medications,

in the contrary, I acknowledge

their value in my own life,

they are not the answer.

And at the very best they should be only

as a stop gap measure until we get

to work on the real issues.

Why this disease, why in

this person and why now?

Unless I answer those questions,

unless I ask those questions,

we can't talk about wholeness.

We can't talk about healing

in the deepest sense.

- I grew up in a family with

a father who was very angry

and never even realized it because for me

it was just natural and normal.

As a kid I didn't know any different,

and I was very scared.

Anytime I acted out in

anger, it always backfired,

so I could never express that anger.

So I decided to go more on

a healing journey myself

and try to find out what could I do myself

to be able to maybe cure this thing,

or at least live longer, feel better

and address it at many different levels.

So I turned to ayahuasca

mainly because of the anxiety

and realizing like what's

a deeper spiritual reason

that I got this diagnosis?

Why did I get this cancer?

I got more out of ayahuasca in one journey

than I probably did in five

years of psychoanalysis.

- What I know about ayahuasca

in the healing of addiction,

ayahuasca being an Amazonian brew

which has got psychedelic qualities.

It can induce visions

and deep experiences.

So there was a ceremony here

led by a Peruvian shaman

and within half an hour of

having ingested the brew,

it felt very much real,

it felt very much like me,

but it was new because I

experienced a state of, um,

such deep love and gratitude such as

I have not recalled experiencing before.

And I saw that my own addictive behaviors

were driven precisely

because I hadn't been able to

experience that kind of love

and that kind of gratitude.

From that state, there's no need to look

for anything else outside of yourself.

And I also learned very shortly

that the ayahuasca has

the power to teach people

about their trauma,

to actually show them

what happened to them.

All of a sudden, oh yes,

this is what happened.

This is why I decided

that life is unbearable.

This is why I decided

that I wasn't lovable.

This is why I decided that

I had to soothe myself

from the outside because

there was no peace inside,

and immediately I sat down

and I worked with this.

And once you start working

with one psychedelic

then you become aware that

there's a whole world out there

and there's a whole resurgence now

in the healing powers of

psychedelic modalities,

and so there are other substances.

The deep therapeutic

potential of psychedelics

resides in the fact that they get

the conditioned mind out of the way.

So people have access to

two aspects of reality

that they're usually not in touch with.

One is the deep trauma and

pain that they're carrying

that they can actually look at now,

and in an appropriate,

compassionate, safe context

they can experience

these troubled emotions

and mind states without having to

be driven into insanity

or having to escape.

If you're going to use psychedelics,

it has to be combined with

very adept therapy at the same time.

So in my work with Tim tomorrow,

we'll be using one of these modalities

to see if he can be

guided deep into himself

so that some answers may emerge

for the existential and life

issues that he's facing.

Hey, Tim.

- Hi, Gabor.

- Come on in.

How are you?

- Good, thank you.

- You're all set?

- Yeah, I'm all set.

- Okay, come on in.

The medication will

take about half an hour

to take effect.

When you're ready, just ingest it.

You've been diagnosed

with prostate cancer.

- Correct.

- And stage four

means that it's spread

to elsewhere in the body?

- Yes, it spread to bone.

Places in my spine, pelvis and ribs.

- In my view of people that develop cancer

tend to be nice people

who are more concerned

with the emotional needs

of others than their own.

They have a hard time

expressing healthy anger.

And also they have this belief

that they must not disappoint anybody.

How do you feel when you perceive

that somebody is not seeing

you, is not listening to you?

- I felt very sad and probably a bit of

a tinge of anger there too, as well.

Yeah.

- So how about

if we rephrase that?

- Aha, anger.

Yeah, yeah, I felt anger.

- What do you feel in your body

when you say those things?

Just check in with your body.

What's happening there?

- I feel a little bit energized from it,

just to saying it, yeah.

Absolutely.

I feel a little bit more awake.

- So notice how you

deprive yourself of energy.

- Mm-hm.

- Okay.

- That makes me just really sad

just thinking about that.

Man it feels good to feel.

But underneath that I just...

Feeling this frustration.

Fuck, it's too much energy that

I've been holding on to contain that.

Like I'm pissed off

that I have to keep fucking

focusing on all this shit,

working on myself.

I'm fucking tired of it.

- So what is the thing that

you need to keep your mind off?

By trying to figure everything out?

- This little boy that

just wants to be loved

and accepted unconditionally...

He wasn't.

And so he's had to figure

out how to be accepted

and loved by others,

and even my internal judge.

It was rough when I was angry.

- You can stop all this work,

just actually, just be

here and whatever there is.

See, as long as you don't

allow the fear to be there,

you're going to be always

working to get rid of it.

That's what the work is all about,

all the work that you're doing.

And then you're gonna keep working

to make yourself

acceptable and always nice

and dutiful and all that.

Or you could say, okay, the fear is there.

I'll let it be there.

I'm big enough to...

There's enough space here for it to,

to be a part of me.

- It just seems too easy.

- Yeah, it's gonna be a lot

more complicated than that.

I developed a method of

therapy or exploration

with people called compassionate inquiry.

The essence of which is the belief that

the truth is inside all of us,

we just have to ask the right questions

to help people arrive at the truth.

If that clenched jaw could speak,

what would it say now?

- I don't want this anymore.

- Okay.

What is the this that you don't want?

- That's what I don't know.

- Look, if you didn't

shut our mouth like this,

what is it that wants to come out

that we're not letting out?

- Rage.

- Yeah. That is the inquiry.

How do you feel about that?

- I think there's a few

feelings associated with that.

- I'm not buying that one.

How do you feel towards it?

How do you feel about that?

I'm a part of you. How

do you feel about that?

What comes up right now?

- Shame.

- Thank you.

What are you ashamed about? Do you know?

- That it is a weakness.

- And you must not be weak?

- Correct.

- Because if you're weak, then what?

- I won't to be able to

take care of those I love.

- So you locate it and it's

here in the chest area.

Just put your attention on it right now.

I mean, we're looking at this blockage

or sense of blockage, okay?

What does it want to say to you?

- It's not a word. It's soothing.

- It's soothing?

- Yeah.

Desiring.

- That it's wanting soothing?

- Yeah.

- If you're in touch with this sense here

that you've just identified,

how familiar is it to you?

- Oh, very.

- How far does it go back?

- Seven. That's when I lost my mother.

But it was present before that.

- Okay.

- So what does it need from you?

- To be held.

- To be held?

- Yeah.

- Like your mother might've held you?

- Yeah.

- So when it arises,

my advice is don't try

and figure out how better to do your work

or how better to be

present or any of that,

or how will I fulfill my calling?

Your calling is really clear,

but this part of you guess what?

Needs to be here, heard and seen.

- All righty.

- Okay?

Yeah?

- Mm-hm. That makes sense.

- That's good.

Any questions?

- I think I'm just supposed

to feel right now.

- Well, that's good.

That means you're paying attention.

He called you something.

- Monster.

- Oh yeah.

He called me monster.

- He called you monster?

- He's called me delusional.

- How do you feel when

he calls you a monster?

- I mean, I feel hurt.

I feel angry.

- Okay.

So what if I said to you,

you got beautiful green hair.

How would you feel about that?

- I'd laugh, I wouldn't-

- Why would you laugh?

- 'Cause I knew my hair is not green.

- Uh huh.

What if I say you were a monster?

- The feeling of the anxiety was so strong

that I wanted to end it.

- Anything familiar about any of that?

- Are you trying to go

back to childhood trauma?

- Who, me?

You see that you developed a belief

that I can't be touched,

nothing can touch me.

Guess what happens when you get sick?

- Mm-hm.

- That defense is now destroyed.

- Pow.

Wow.

- I ask people to tell

me some recent episode

when they're upset with

somebody in their lives,

and something that

they're open to sharing.

So it doesn't have to be

anything sordid or anything

but just something, you know,

whether it's your spouse,

partner, the bus driver,

I don't care.

- Sure.

- A friend.

Okay, so what happened?

- You want me to describe it?

- What happened? Yeah.

- All right, there were a

number of issues in my home

and I had hired someone to do

these things while I was gone

and I came back and

none of them were fixed.

- Okay. And your emotional reaction was?

- Anger.

- Anything else besides anger?

- I was disappointed.

- Disappointed is sadness.

- Let's go with that.

- Okay.

So I'm going to ask you a silly question.

What were you sad and angry about?

- Well angry that someone

had made commitments to me

and not fulfilled those commitments.

- What does that mean that they didn't

fulfill their commitments?

- Uh, it meant that they

didn't care about me.

They didn't have that...

They disrespect me.

- So they didn't care

about you and didn't respect you.

What kind of person doesn't

get cared or respected?

- I don't know.

Someone who doesn't deserve

to be cared for or respected.

- Exactly.

Are there other reasons

why this other person

might not have done the

work that has nothing

to do with him or her not caring about Tim

or not respecting him?

So what other reasons might there be?

- Uh, he had a flight delay

and got caught on Puerto

Rico during a hurricane.

- Yeah, he's got ADHD.

- Yeah.

- And he can't follow through,

and any number of possibilities.

- Yeah.

- Now, of all the possibilities

that you've just outlined,

including that they don't

care about you or respect you,

which is the worst one?

- The one I immediately defaulted to.

- So let's notice something.

A, you, I should say we,

'cause we're all like this,

we don't respond to what happens.

We respond to our

perception of what happens.

- Right.

- Okay.

That's what the Buddha said.

It's with our minds we create the world.

Number two, of all the

possible interpretations,

we choose the worst one.

Thirdly, what I just said isn't true.

We didn't choose it.

It's not like you went through

all these possibilities

and you said-

- Was a multiple choice

and I chose option D.

- Oh no,

he doesn't care about me

and he doesn't respect me.

You didn't do that.

Your brain jumped there

automatically, right?

My question is why?

First time in your life

that you felt hurt and angry

when you perceived somebody

didn't care about you

and didn't respect you?

- It's not the first time.

- Very good.

And most people I talk

to, it goes back way back.

- Yeah. This goes way back.

- Into childhood.

- Mm-hm.

- Okay.

And that's what trauma is.

We don't respond to the present moment.

We respond to the past.

So who's the one that

doesn't care about you

and who's the one that doesn't think

you're worthy of respect?

- Oh, it'd be me.

- It would be you.

- Yeah.

- So that's the learning,

and that's the beauty of healing

is that when you reframe things

and you actually see the

source within ourselves,

all of a sudden that's liberating.

Because guess what?

If you're feeling that way

because this guy did this

or didn't do that, that

makes you a victim.

- Yeah.

- But if you see that you are the source,

now you're powerful.

Can you have a vision of

society that incorporates

the achievements of modern civilization

while at the same time still honors

the essence of human nature?

I think the answer is yes.

I know the answer is yes,

not that I expect to

see it in my lifetime.

We need trauma informed medical care,

trauma informed education

and trauma informed therapy.

- Everybody that has listened to a talk

or read his book always said to me

I don't feel like I'm

a bad person anymore.

I can see their heads higher.

Yeah, they're still using substances,

but something inside of

them is starting to change.

That's their shame is kind of dissipating.

- Without me stumbling

across his work, I tell you,

I tell you, I would've

been a different person.

Personal childhood trauma is key

because once you understand that,

know you were a child

and you didn't have help,

and if it's about love them

why are we locking them up?

- Underneath that traumatized persona,

there's the healthy individual

who has never found

expression in this life.

If you see that, then

you're trauma informed,

it's not a question of healing the trauma

or of ever getting rid of

the memory of what happened,

but to help that person expand

so that there's space

for all those emotions.

- Dr. Mate, he allowed me to feel

that what I was seeing

was a humanistic crisis.

It was a human not being identified

in the light in which they deserve to be.

We as caretakers in this world

need to see the human in

front of us, not the problem.

We still have each other's numbers.

You'll call me?

- Yeah, yeah.

- Okay.

- All right.

Good to see you, buddy.

- Good to see you.

I missed you.

- All right.

- Bye.

How have you been?

It cannot be a general construct

of this is how we're dealing

with people who are homeless,

this is how we're dealing with people

who are are addicted to drugs.

No, this is how we deal with Sarah,

this is how we deal with Jose.

This is how we are in relationship

to each and every person

experiencing trauma

within their lives.

That is what has been the

essence to his teaching for me.

Hi, who's this?

- Fang.

- Hi Fang, how are you doing?

Fang, are you his little companion?

- When we start the journey

of being compassionate

with ourselves, not only

does it change ourselves,

it changes our communities

and our society.

- Today I'm still healing.

I'm still healing from

my abandonment issues.

I'm a lifer inmate.

Being here today, witnessing all you guys'

traumatic experiences gives me motivation,

gives me inspiration to continue on

the path that I'm currently on.

- Every human being has a

true, genuine, authentic self.

And that true, genuine authentic self

can never be destroyed.

- When people say you have

a second chance in life,

today I know what that means.

So I performed for the first time singing,

after not singing in 20 years.

So I performed in front

of over 400 people.

That was a dream come true,

and I was able to reunite with my mother.

When God blessed me with this son,

my four-year-old boy Douglas,

I made a promise to

myself and I said, listen,

I want to be a mom.

I want to be a good mom.

The baby's dad is also with me.

He's my babysitter.

- I've been clean for the

last 10 and a half months.

'Cause you did, you made

a difference in my life.

- Thank you for being in touch.

# Through the mist and the pain #

# I've learned to maintain #

# There is no shame #

- I am happy to say now

that through my own healing,

after being off my medication

now for six months,

I've gone in remission.

The cancer is just not, is not growing.

This is the first time in four years

where this has happened, so

this is absolutely amazing.

- It's been spiritual work for us both

and I've grown up in the relationship.

I've healed in the relationship.

I'm still healing in the relationship.

To me this is an incredible love story.

It's really inspiring how he's changed.

So as we've gotten older,

somehow we've gotten freer and younger.

We just get closer and closer.

It gets better and better.

- It's a dynamic, emergent process

of confrontation with the truth

that solutions will arise.

Trauma involves a lifelong pushing down,

a tremendous expenditure of energy,

into not feeling the pain.

As we heal, that same

energy is liberated for life

and for being in the present.

So the energy of trauma can be transformed

into the energy of life.

# You can see it in the cars #

# It's playing on the radio #

# It's written in the stars #

# And living in me #

# You can read it in the cards #

# And hear it in stereo #

# It's a bullet in your heart #

# And a trigger in me #

# You can see it in the young #

# They saw it on a video #

# Loaded like a gun #

# It's aiming at me #

# Everybody in the run #

# Talking on the telephone #

# Hurry up and have fun #

# 'Cause it's killing me #

# Over and over and over once again #

# They will find you #

# You'll let them in #

# Over and over and over once again #

# They will find you #

# Under your skin #

# The way that it's working #

# You know it's not working #

# The way things are going #

# Where are we going #

# What does it matter #

# It's mind over matter #

# When it's all over #

# Nothing is over #

# Ooh ooh ooh ooh #

# Ooh ooh ooh #

# Ooh ooh ooh ooh #

# Ooh ooh #

# It's a devil in disguise #

# hidden in the media #

# It's a hunger in your eyes #

# It's feeding on me #

# Everybody with their lives #

# Coming from the satellite #

# I'm walking on a wire #

# They keep following me #

# Over and over and over once again #

# They will find you #

# You'll let them in #

# Over and over and over once again #

# They will bind you #

# Under your skin #

# But the way that's it working #

# You know it's not working #

# The way things are going #

# Where are we going #

# What does it matter #

# It's mind over matter #

# When it's all over #

# Nothing is over #

# The way that it's working #

# You know it's not working #

# The way things are going #

# Where are we going #

# What does it matter #

# It's mind over matter #

# When it's all over #

# Nothing is over #

# What does it matter #

# It's mind over matter #

The Wisdom of Trauma (2021) - full transcript