Is Gabor Mate Helpful or Toxic?

Gabor Mate insists all our troubles come down to trauma since 1999 yet his own spiritual breakthrough suggests that's wrong

Did you know that you are traumatized and it is the source of nearly all of your problems?

It’s true. You’re actually kind of unusual if you’re not traumatized, at least according to Gabor Mate. Mate has said that

“someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society.”

Mate also said that:

“Trauma is underneath all human dysfunction,” which includes everything from ADHD and addiction to more vague things “confusion” and “separation from the self.”

We’re all fish struggling with water toxicity.

Of course trauma is so pervasive, because according to Mate, the bar for trauma is really low.

There can be two types of wound… “There’s the capital-T traumatic events,” which include things like being abused as a child and the loss of a parent. Then there are “small-T traumas”. “You can wound a kid not only by doing bad things to them, but by also not meeting their needs,” he says. Even doting parents can easily, unknowingly, inflict small-T traumas on their children. He would know, because, as he admits, he inflicted them on his own kids.

Damn, I really like and am grateful my parents, I can’t think of any way they traumatized me …but I guess I better call them up and give them a piece of my mind because they surely screwed me up somehow.

Using his “psychotherapeutic” technique, Compassionate Inquiry, Dr. Mate can rapidly convince patients how even minor, normal things are actually the result of childhood trauma. In this demo of compassionate inquiry with Mark Walsh, Mate asks Walsh to offer up any sort of problem he might be having that he wishes to address. Put on the spot, Walsh noted that he felt a little guilty for having a sugary drink right before his interview with Mate because he’s trying to improve his diet and is supposed to be a good example for the thousands of people tuning into his channel. In a matter of 5 minutes, Gabor Mate linked this behavior back to childhood trauma.

In the process of compassionate inquiry (i.e. “let me show you how you have trauma”), they got to the ‘root’ of Walsh’s shame. Mate asked him to envision the very first time he felt shame. Walsh said the first memory of shame was when he was 4 and ashamed of his father’s alcoholism. To really put Walsh back in that situation, he asked Walsh to imagine swapping his niece out for his 4 year old self. How would she have felt if in the presence of his alcoholic father at the time. He said she would certainly be uncomfortable. Gabor Mate then explained to Walsh that it is evident that his shame for the soda pop is linked to his childhood shame for his father’s alcoholism.

(Not to say an alcoholic father could not be tough on a child, but I’m not seeing what that has to do with drinking soda today.)

The word “trauma” comes from Greek, literally meaning “wound.” How do you act when you have a wound? If you have a wound on your foot, you’re probably not going to go running. If you have a wound on your stomach, you’re probably a little more careful when you scoot your chair towards the table. You might put your clothes on a bit more gingerly if your arm is wounded. Wounds affect your behavior.

Most bodily wounds heal, and usually you don’t even need to do anything. How long does it take for psychological trauma to heal? Apparently for Gabor Mate, 70 years isn’t enough.

The Guardian article The trauma doctor: Gabor Maté on happiness, hope and how to heal our deepest wounds discusses an interview with Gabor Mate. It opens with Mate’s anecdote of him at 71 years of age being incensed with his wife that she did not pick him up at the airport on time, and his anger manifested in passive aggression that lead him to “barely make eye contact” with his wife for an entire day.

Back to the airport. “At times like this, there is very little grown-up Gabor in the mix,” he writes. “Most of me is in the grips of the distant past. This kind of physio-emotional time warp, preventing me from inhabiting the present moment, is one of the imprints of trauma, an underlying theme for many people in this culture.”

Apparently, “most of” Dr. Mate is mentally stuck in the past, gingerly tending a wound generated when he was just 11 months old.

The template for his hostility … is to be found in the messages he received as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Maté was born in January 1944; in May of that year, the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz began. …When he was 11 months old, his mother sent him with a stranger to be cared for by his aunt.

This was elaborated on in a different Guardian article.

Later, Maté’s mother, fearing for his survival, left him for a month in the care of a stranger. All this, he explains, gave him a lifelong sense of abandonment and loss which had an impact on his psychological health. It affected his marriage and his own parenting experience. To compensate for his buried trauma, he had buried himself in work and neglected his family.

How does he know?

Considering that memory is well understood to be fickle and malleable, that most people don’t retain memories before age two, and that the accuracy of memories declines the more time has passed since the event, it’s very speculative for Mate to make conclusions about how an incident from over 70 years ago when he was 11 months old affects his behavior today.

‘Joseph, how can you take such a jab at a well respected trauma doctor who has done the admirable and difficult work of investigating his own life in order to discover the path to healing all our traumas?’

That’s the thing. It doesn’t really seem like Gabor Mate’s focus on trauma has lead him to be an exemplar of well-being.

Per an article from 2015:

“Today, Gabor Maté lives in Vancouver. He still struggles to feel at peace. He goes shopping to feel better. He spends lots of money on music records. His wife gets mad at him. They cannot afford for Gabor to keep buying new records. There is no space in their house for more records. But he can’t stop. Gabor has developed an addiction to shopping. An addiction is a strong and harmful need to do something.”

“He says we must stop judging people for the ways they cope with their difficult lives. We must make a world where people can get their needs met and everyone is treated with respect.”

So what about feedback from the people exposed to Mate’s work? Apparently Mate’s best result is not when someone tells him that his wisdom has lead them to improving their lives thanks to completely freeing themselves of the issues that their trauma generated … but simply that someone can “understand” why their child died of an overdose.

One of the best things that ever happens to him, he says, is when a parent whose child has died of an overdose comes up to him and tells him that, through his book, they can understand why it happened.

So, what exactly have they come to understand about their child’s death?

In his book on addiction In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Mate emphasizes that early childhood experiences, including the quality of parenting and attachment, significantly impact brain development and emotional health. He suggests that when children experience stress or trauma, particularly when these experiences involve their primary caregivers, it can affect their ability to regulate emotions and stress.

(The book mentions “parent” and “child” over 150 times each.)

Mate has said that

Even doting parents can easily, unknowingly, inflict small-T traumas on their children.

So, again Mate is proud that parents “understand” why their child overdosed. Given that Mate says that a child’s upbringing and early environment can lead to trauma and trauma can lead to addiction …is it not very likely that part of the parent’s “understanding” of the cause of their child’s death was how it was their fault? So he’s happy they learned that they are part of the reason their child overdosed?

Gabor Mate’s spiritual contradiction

Gabor Mate explains that he had a spiritual breakthrough on Ayahuasca where he saw the Hungarian word boldog (“happy” or “blessed”) spelled out in the sky, allowing him to (in his own words):

“realize all that stuff that had happened to me need not define my existence. That all that had happened to my family, all that happens in a world, painful, distressing, tragic, traumatizing as it all can be, it doesn’t have to define who I am or my future or my relationship to life or my relation to myself or my relationship to anything. So it was a liberation from the past is what it was.”

What? You mean trauma need not matter? Trauma, the thing he has been slowly working towards arguing is the cause of “all human dysfunction” since 1999 with the publication of his book Scattered Minds, doesn’t have to define you?