From the Holocaust to Gaza: Dr. Gabor Maté on the Impact of Trauma

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Bianna. Dr. Gabor Maté, thank you so much for speaking with us.

GABOR MATÉ: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: You are renowned for your work as a physician, an author, a speaker. Many people know your work or especially your work and the way that trauma, trauma can have generational impacts. But for people who are not familiar with your work, would you mind describing how your family’s experience with the Holocaust informs this work?

MATÉ: Well, I was born a Jewish infant two months before the Nazis occupied my home country, Hungary. My grandparents died in Auschwitz when I was five months of age. My mother and I came very close to being deported there ourselves. My father was away for the first year and a half of my life doing forced labor. I was heavily impacted by the bombing of the war, and of course, by the terror inflicted on the Jewish people in my homeland, and that has had lifelong effects on my fundamental functioning, emotional functioning, how I feel about myself…I’ve had to do a lot of healing to overcome many of the impacts of that trauma.

MARTIN: How did you come to know this about yourself? Because I think some people think that experiences that infants have, you know, your pre-verbal at that time, and so you wouldn’t have the ability to sort of articulate those memories. How did you come to know that those early experiences, those early experiences, had such a deep impact on your life?

MATÉ: Well, I came to know first of all by having to deal with my own issues, with my difficulty paying attention, my ADHD tendencies, my depression, my self dislike despite all the success that I had in the world. And then of course, as a physician and a researcher and a reader of the research, I found out about how early experiences, pre-verbal experiences, even intrauterine experiences shaped the human brain and the human personality. And it was not difficult to draw the links between my early experiences and my later challenges given what science has told us about the impact of early experiences, and the more preverbal it is, the deeper it is actually.

MARTIN: One of the other things about your work that strikes us is that it’s, you describe the impact of trauma on a cellular level, on an individual level, but you also describe it as having social impact. That there can be traumas that penetrate a society deeply. And that’s one of the reasons we called you because we are in the throes of a moment of sort of profound international trauma. Let’s just start with what happened in Israel. We are more than a year past the Hamas attack on Southern Israel. 

What impact do you think it has both on the people who directly experienced it and on the society at large? And then of course, I’m gonna then ask you about Gaza, because as we are speaking now, it’s estimated that nearly 50,000 people have been killed so far. And the number may be greater than that.

MATÉ: Well, let’s face it, on October the seventh over 1200 people were killed. And that came up as a huge shock to Israelis. And many of them experienced it as very traumatic as we were expecting to. And that’s natural and understandable. And one can only feel with them for the shock and the trauma that they experienced. All the more so since they grew up in Israel. And I’m speaking as a former Zionist, I’m speaking as a Jew. I’m speaking as somebody who’s been to Israel, who’s been to the occupied territories, who’s been to Gaza, been to the West Bank, has worked with Israeli psychologists and therapists and Palestinian therapists and psychologists. The Israeli mentality has always been that we’re under attack, we’re under threat, they’re all against us. And so October the seventh was simply more confirmation of what they had already believed.

The problem, from my point of view is, and from anybody’s point of view, who looks at it objectively, history did not begin on October the seventh. There’s a conflict there that’s been going on for at least 1947, 48, but if you’ll get it historically, it’s been going on for 150 years. And so that, that terrible event of October the seventh was one more manifestation of an intractable and generally destructive, traumatic conflict that has beset that area of the world for a long time. So as much as we have to recognize the shock and trauma of October the seventh, we cannot separate it from the history that preceded it.

MARTIN: You know, obviously Israelis often feel that they are singled out for sort of a moral scrutiny that is not directed at others. And, but having said that, does that experience of inherited trauma and experience trauma in real time, ft you think it’s influencing the way Israeli leadership and Israeli society is responding to what happened?

MATÉ: It’s interesting that one more time, we begin with the experience and the subject with the response of Israelis, whereas if you look at historically, by vast gap, the greatest trauma has been inflicted on the Palestinians for decades.

MARTIN: Well talk, say more about that then. Say more about what you mean by that.

MATÉ: Well in just 1947/48, there were tens of thousands of Palestinians massacred by the Israelis. And in 20 thou – in the Lebanese war, 20,000 civilians were killed by the Israelis in Lebanon. Civilians. I can name you multiple massacres of Palestinians documented by Israeli historians. I’m not repeating Arab propaganda here. I’m telling you what Israeli historians have unearthed and documented and proven without a shadow of a doubt. And in the West, we tend not to talk about that. We tend to talk about Israelis purely as victims. No, surely Israelis have been victimized. There’s been some terrible terrorism that they’ve suffered. Nobody’s questioning that and nobody’s justifying it either. But it happened in the context. So when Israelis believe that they’re singled out for criticism, they’re not singled out for nearly the criticism that the Palestinian-siders received over the decades, despite the fact that the Palestinians have suffered a lot more. And I hate to compare suffering. But in terms of numbers and in terms of power, loss of lands, oppression, discrimination, there’s no comparison in actual practice. And anybody who goes there like I have, and you see it with your own eyes, you can’t help but come to that conclusion. Now what’s also true, that given Jewish history.

Given the historical and unspeakable suffering of the Jewish people, not just, of course, primarily, but not only during the Nazi genocide, but for hundreds of years before that and decades before that, it’s kind of natural for many Jews to perceive themselves as always being under attack. And so that the Palestinian Israeli conflict is viewed by them from that lens of historical persecution. I can understand why that should be the case. But it doesn’t make it accurate because it removes from the equation, the Palestinian experience that we, that we tend not to look at.

MARTIN: Well, and let’s proceed there because, you know, obviously look, as a journalist, I have my own lens here. And one of the lenses through which I’m looking at this is the fact that independent journalists have not been permitted to go to Gaza during this conflict. But there has been vast destruction. And we know according to the health authorities there, that there has been tremendous death and suffering. And in some parts of the country, you know, people are on the verge of starvation if they are not starving already. I mean, this has been documented by international agencies that have had access to those, to that area. So if you could just describe that, like what impact do you think this experience – I’m recognizing what you said, that this is a moment in time, but just this moment in time for the people who were living through that.

MATÉ: In the journal World Psychiatry in 2006, there was a study of Palestinian kids. This is before Hamas came to power. So let’s not begin the assumption that it all started when Hamas took power. This study was done before Hamas took power in Gaza. And 97% of Palestine of Gazan children showed signs of post-traumatic stress. We’re talking 20 years ago now. And many of them wet their beds. I wet my bed till I was 13 years of age as a result of my experience as a Jewish infant in the second World War, under the Nazis. Large percentage of Palestinians were wetting their beds over 20 years ago. They had symptoms of nightmares, exhibited symptoms of aggression towards their parents. There was a study of Palestinian kids just in December of this last year. 96% of them thought that death was imminent. They saw 79% suffer from nightmares. 73% exhibited symptoms of aggression. In other words, what was observed in this journal of World Psychiatry over 20 years ago has now become that much more exasperate, exacerbated. And that’s the reality.

And what to say, how can I, given what I’ve experienced as a Jewish infant and as a Jewish kid growing up under antisemitism in Hungary, before we came to Canada, how can I not feel with these kids having seen what they’ve been through, having been there, having seen how they live even before this current conflict? So it’s a horrendous situation and we can’t just restrict our empathy to one side. And we also have to look at the power relationships. I mean, one side has been inflicting it on the other with great preponderance. And if you go to the West Bank, as I was there two and a half years ago working with Palestinian women who had been tortured in Israeli jails, what you hear all the time is that there’s no post-traumatic stress disorder here because the trauma is never POST. It’s ongoing. And so horrendous as October the seventh was, if we’re gonna deal with this in a humane way, in a human way, in a scientific way, we have to look at the overall context and extend at least as much empathy to one side as to the other.

MARTIN: So how, what is the way forward here when you have people who, I mean, because there’s the, there’s the human suffering and then there’s politics of the moment. And the politics of the moment, often either they shape human suffering and they sometimes obliterate or obscure human suffering. Right. So what’s the way forward here?

MATÉ: First of all, we have to acknowledge the suffering on all sides and the trauma on all sides. The historical trauma that was the impetus for the Zionist project and the historical trauma that the Zionist project has inflicted on the Palestinian people and continues to. We have to pay more attention, I believe, to those Israelis, the small minority in any country at any time…

I mean, there’s something very beautiful about Jewish tradition. And one of the most beautiful things about Jewish tradition is their prophetic tradition. And the prophets weren’t people that kowtowed to public opinion, and they didn’t kowtow to the leaders. They said ‘there’s a higher value, there’s a higher good, there’s a higher God, there’s a higher truth than nationalism, than chauvinism, than deference to authority.’ And it’s to that higher truth that we pay attention to. And there are people in Israel now who advocate that, but we never hear, we rarely hear their voices here in the West. So they need to be paid more attention to.

I think the unconditional support for the continued suppression of the Palestinians, the attack on villages in the West Bank that’s going on currently, even after the ceasefire in Gaza, largely unquestioned acceptance of the Israeli perspective needs to be challenged. I think the Palestinians also have to deal with the fact that they’ve done some horrible things, or some horrible things have been done in their name. They need to deal with that. They need to take responsibility for it. I think what I’d like to see is – what I’d like to see in general in human life – is that people take responsibility for their own actions and not to see themselves all the time as victims of the other, but to recognize what they’ve done to the other themselves. 

MARTIN: Since your latest book is the “Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture,” 

MATÉ: I wrote that with my son Daniel. Yes.

MARTIN: What should we draw from this in the current moment? 

MATÉ: Well, what I was pointing out in that book,  is the inseparability of the mind from the body. The unity of mind and body and human health and illness, which also means the inseparability of the individual from the environment, because our minds and emotions are shaped by our relationships, so that you can’t separate the individual from the culture, from the society, from the community, from the history, multi-generationally, so that all kinds of conditions that are thought to be discreet illnesses and show up as forms of disease are actually relatable to people’s experience in life and to the culture in which they live. Which also means that culture needs to heal as much as individuals need to heal.

And in the book, we point out the ways in which trauma shows up in people’s lives, personal lives, health, mental health, physical health, addictions, other afflictions, also on social and political life. We also point towards some pathways towards healing. So on the whole, the book is a positive message, but it does have to begin with looking at how things are very objectively and not separate phenomena that can’t be separated, not separate the mind from the body, not separate the emotions from the physiology, not separate the individual from the environment, not separate the environment from the culture, and not separate the culture from the whole universal world that we all share.

MARTIN: But this is where I keep going back to the experience of the Holocaust and also the experiences that Palestinians have had now. For a lot of people, you know, their culture is a source of strength. And these historical, it’s a source of strength, it’s a source of identity, it’s a source of belonging. I think that’s one reason why people, you know, call people like you a traitor, because they say, well, how, how do you disengage from this history that we share? So how do you, how do you extricate one from the other?

MATÉ: Well, I think you just touched upon the key question in this whole conversation. The thing to realize is trauma is not what happened to us. Trauma is what happens inside us as a result of what happened to us. So the trauma, let’s say look back, go back to the trauma of me being given by my mother to a stranger in the street, which was what happened. And I didn’t see her for six weeks thanks to this. And my life was saved thanks to this Christian woman who conveyed me to some safety. And I didn’t see my mother for six weeks. But that wasn’t the trauma, that was the traumatic event.

The trauma was the belief that I developed, that I wasn’t lovable because who gets given away, somebody who’s not lovable. The trauma wasn’t that I didn’t see my mother all those weeks. The trauma was that I began to believe in a world that’s not safe and in which I don’t belong. So those traumatic wound – and trauma literally means wound. So trauma is a wound. It’s not the wounding event, it’s the wound itself. And if we carry a wound in the present from something that happened in the past, we don’t have to heal the past. We have to heal the wound in the present. And I can heal the wound of believing that I’m not lovable. I can heal the wound that I believe that I live in a world that doesn’t accept me or doesn’t love or in which I can’t find safety. I can heal those wounds. So the thing about healing trauma is not to keep looking at the past and not to be identified at the, by the past, but to ask ourselves, who are we at this present moment as human beings, so that the past doesn’t define us, it informs us. It explains a lot of things about us, but we’re not our past.

MARTIN: Dr. Gabor Maté, thank you so much for speaking with us. 

MATÉ: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to speak with you as well.