Gabor Maté: The Childhood Lie That's Ruining All Of Our Lives

A Baby Crying in Budapest

Dr Gabor Maté begins with the story that shaped everything. In March 1944, when he was two months old, the German army occupied Hungary. The day after the occupation, his mother called the paediatrician: 'Gabor is crying all the time.' The doctor replied: 'Of course I'll come, but all my Jewish babies are crying.'

That single detail encapsulates Maté's life work. Infants don't understand geopolitics. They don't know about Nazis or ghettos. What they feel is their mother's terror — and they take it personally. When a mother is grief-stricken, stressed, and terrified, the baby doesn't think 'my mother is scared.' The baby thinks 'I am not wanted. I am not good enough. I caused this.'

Maté's grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. His father was in forced labour. His mother, to save his life, gave him to a stranger for six weeks. Objectively, it was an act of love. Subjectively, to an infant brain, it was abandonment. At 70 years old, during a therapeutic psilocybin session, Maté found himself experiencing life as a one-year-old again, crying to a therapist he perceived as his mother: 'I'm so sorry I made your life so difficult.'

The Childhood Lie: You Weren't Good Enough

This is the 'childhood lie' of the episode's title. Infants are inherently narcissistic — not in the pejorative sense, but developmentally. They literally cannot conceive of a world that doesn't revolve around them. When parents are stressed, distant, fighting, or emotionally unavailable, children don't blame circumstances. They blame themselves.

This template — 'I'm not enough' — then runs silently in the background of adult life, driving workaholism, people-pleasing, perfectionism, addiction, and toxic relationships. Maté argues this isn't just his story. Financial stress in parents translates into physiological stress in children. Screaming between parents creates guilt and responsibility in kids. The normal range of Western childhood, with its disconnected parents, overworked schedules, and emotional suppression, produces traumatised adults at scale.

The Myth of Normal

Maté's book The Myth of Normal takes its title partly from Eckhart Tolle's observation that the normal range of human behaviour contains a strong element of dysfunction. What we call 'normal' in modern society — chronic stress, emotional suppression, disconnection from self — is neither healthy nor natural. It's normalised illness.

He introduces psycho-neuroimmunology, the scientific field studying how emotions, the nervous system, the immune system, and hormones form an interlinked unity. A study on rats demonstrated that nurturing parents dramatically affected their offspring's ability to handle stress. The same applies to humans. Maté argues that doctors should ask about patients' lives and emotional histories rather than simply prescribing medication for symptoms.

Rheumatoid arthritis, he notes, is a stress-driven disease. Autoimmune conditions, many cancers, and chronic illnesses have documented links to unresolved psychological trauma. The body keeps the score — and eventually, it presents the bill.

Big T and Small t Trauma

Maté distinguishes between 'Big T' traumas — physical abuse, sexual abuse, war, natural disasters — and 'small t' traumas, which are far more common and equally damaging. Small t trauma is the absence of what should have been present: unconditional love, emotional attunement, feeling seen and safe. You don't need to have been beaten to be traumatised. You just needed to not have been held enough.

He uses Donald Trump as a case study — not politically, but psychologically. Trump's father was, by many accounts, a cold and demanding figure. The result: grandiosity, denial of reality, aggression, and an insatiable need for significance. These aren't character flaws, Maté argues. They're survival mechanisms formed in childhood, operating on autopilot decades later.

Trauma as Puppet Master

The central metaphor of the episode is trauma as an unconscious puppet master. Most people believe they're making free choices — but their reactions, relationships, career decisions, and emotional patterns are being pulled by strings attached in childhood. You're not choosing to be anxious. You're not choosing to self-sabotage. A younger version of you learned that anxiety kept you safe, and that pattern never got updated.

Awareness, Maté says, is the first step. You can't change what you can't see. The methods for developing awareness include introspection, journaling, meditation, therapy, bodywork, and — controversially — psychedelics in therapeutic settings. His own psilocybin experience demonstrated how deeply childhood templates persist, even in someone who has spent decades studying them professionally.

The Five R's: A Framework for Healing

Maté offers a practical framework for undoing self-limiting beliefs:

Relabel: Recognise the belief for what it is — not truth, but a survival mechanism. When you think 'I'm not good enough,' label it: 'That's a childhood belief, not a fact.'

Reattribute: Trace the belief back to its origin. Where did you first learn this? What was happening in your family when this belief formed?

Refocus: Create space between the belief and yourself. When the old pattern activates, intentionally redirect your attention elsewhere — don't engage with it, don't argue with it, just redirect.

Revalue: Look honestly at the impact this belief has had on your life. What has it cost you? What relationships has it damaged? What opportunities has it prevented?

Recreate: Replace the old belief with something more aligned with who you actually are, rather than who you needed to be at age four to survive.

ADHD: Trauma Disguised as a Brain Disorder

Maté's take on ADHD is provocative. He argues that in many cases, what gets diagnosed as Attention Deficit Disorder is actually a trauma response. Children in chaotic, stressful, or emotionally unpredictable environments learn to 'tune out' as a coping mechanism. This dissociation — a survival strategy — later gets labelled as an attention deficit.

The increase in ADHD diagnoses tracks with increasing parental stress from factors like inflation, longer working hours, and dual-income households. Boys and children of colour are disproportionately diagnosed. Maté doesn't dismiss medication entirely — it can help adults function — but he insists that addressing the underlying trauma is essential for genuine healing rather than symptom management.

Addiction: Why the Pain?

Working for 33 years in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside — North America's most concentrated area of drug use — taught Maté that addiction is never the core problem. It's always an attempt to escape pain. The question society should be asking isn't 'why the addiction?' but 'why the pain?'

He applies this broadly: phone addiction, workaholism, compulsive shopping, and social media dependence are all strategies for avoiding discomfort. Maté confesses to his own phone addiction and the difficulty of being alone with himself — evidence that decades of studying trauma doesn't inoculate you against its effects.