Dr. Gabor Maté: Trauma, Addiction, Ayahuasca, and More

8 tactics for understanding pain instead of fighting its symptoms. The core idea most people get backwards: the addiction, the rage, the numbing are not the problem, they are someone's attempt to solve one.

With Gabor Maté

"Addiction is not the primary problem, it's an attempt to solve a problem." — Dr. Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté, on the episode

Maté is a physician who spent twelve years working with addiction in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, alongside decades in family medicine and palliative care. The pop framing of his work is "trauma talk." The actual operating system underneath is a clinical model: behaviors people hate in themselves, the addictions, the rage, the tuning out, all began as coping mechanisms that worked when the person was young and powerless, then got programmed in and kept running long after they stopped helping. This protocol pulls the specific reframes and practices he uses to move someone from self-condemnation to self-connection.