7 Nov 2022 All The Diary Of A CEO Episodes
Doctor Gabor Mate is a multi-bestselling author and a world-leading expert on trauma and how it affects us throughout our whole lives. A holocaust survivor and a first-generation immigrant, Gabor’s knowledge and wisdom on the scars trauma leaves behind is deep and drawn from personal experience.
12 Oct 2023 All The Diary Of A CEO Episodes
Gabor Maté CM (born January 6, 1944) is a Hungarian-Canadian physician and author. He has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development, trauma, and potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health including autoimmune disease, cancer, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addictions, and a wide range of other conditions.
Maté’s approach to addiction focuses on the trauma his patients have suffered and looks to address this in their recovery. In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Maté discusses the types of trauma suffered by persons with substance use disorders and how this affects their decision-making in later life.
He has authored five books exploring topics including ADHD, stress, developmental psychology, and addiction. He is a regular columnist for the Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. He regards ADHD not as a pathology but rather as a coping mechanism.
Background
Maté was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1944. His maternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz when he was five months old. His aunt disappeared during the war, and his father endured forced labour at the hands of the Nazi Party.
When he was 1, Maté’s mother put him in the care of a stranger for over 5 weeks in order to save his life. Upon their reunion, the infant Maté was so hurt that he avoided looking at his mother for several days. He claims this trauma of “abandonment, rage, and despair” continues to manifest in his adult life, leading to similar altercations when he perceives a threat of abandonment, especially from his wife.
In 1956, Maté emigrated to Canada. He was a student during the Vietnam War era in the late 1960s and graduated with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
In 1969, Maté married artist and fellow UBC graduate Rae Maté; together they have three children including writer and journalist Aaron Maté.
After working as a high school English and literature teacher for several years, he returned to the University of British Columbia to obtain his M.D. in general family practice in 1977.
Maté ran a private family practice in East Vancouver for over 20 years. He was the medical coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital for seven years. For 12 years, he was the staff physician at Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre located in downtown Vancouver.
Many of his patients had co-occurring mental health and substance use concerns, in addition to chronic health concerns, such as HIV. He worked in harm reduction clinics in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He has written about his experiences working with persons with substance use disorders in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
Maté made national headlines in defense of the physicians working at Insite (a legally supervised safe injection site) after the federal Minister of Health, Tony Clement, attacked them as unethical.
In 2010, Maté became interested in the traditional Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca and its potential for treating addictions. He partnered with a Peruvian Shipibo ayahuasquero (traditional shamanic healer) and began leading multi-day retreats for addiction treatment, including ones in a Coast Salish First Nations community that were the subject of an observational study by health researchers from the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia.
Although preliminary and limited by the observational study design, the research results showed that participants had significant improvements in some psychological measures and reductions in problematic substance use, suggesting that Maté’s claims of therapeutic efficacy may be well-founded.
However, when the Canadian federal government learned about Maté’s work with ayahuasca in 2011, Health Canada threatened to refer the matter to the RCMP if he did not immediately stop his activities with an illegal drug.
Compassion
Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapeutic method developed by Dr. Gabor Maté that reveals what lies beneath the appearance we present to the world. Using Compassionate Inquiry, the therapist unveils the level of consciousness, mental climate, hidden assumptions, implicit memories, and body states that form the real message that words both express and conceal. Through Compassionate Inquiry, the client can recognize the unconscious dynamics that run their lives and how to liberate themselves from them.
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