If you don't know how to say no your body will do it for you and it'll do it in the
form of chronic illness this comes straight from the mouth of Dr Gabor
Mate who's one of the most well-respected physicians and researchers in the realm
of addiction trauma and even adhd now I've followed his work for a very long time now
I've read his books I've watched tons of his videos I even attended a conference
where he was speaking but recently I was watching one of his videos and he said
something that just struck me completely different now to be honest it's not that
much different than the things he normally talks about but you know
how sometimes just a light bulb goes off or you hear something differently
that's what happened to me in this case and maybe it was because the topic was framed
differently from what Dr gabor Mate normally talks about he normally talks about the person
with trauma addiction and adhd but in this circumstance he was actually talking about
what happens to people who care for other people now he wasn't talking specifically
about what happens to people who care for people with addictions
he was talking about it in a more general way taking care of a family member who's
got an illness working in the medical profession or even just being a parent
but as he's talking about this I start really connecting the dots
to what's happening to the loved ones of people struggling with an addiction
now listening to all this actually started making me feel really guilty I think it just
struck a nerve with something that I sort of internally struggle with pretty commonly
but it just sort of hit the button on this particular day I kind of always have this
sort of constant ongoing back and forth dilemma and dynamic inside of me about
the advice I give on these videos because I feel I'm constantly telling you as a family
member how to help your addicted loved one and a lot of that advice
involves suppressing your feelings suppressing your urges and dealing with a very very stressful
situation in a different way now I absolutely stand by the things that I teach you as far
as what is going to help your addicted loved one but I also have this other naggy part of
me inside that feels super mixed up because I'm aware of the toll it takes on you as a person
and so when I was listening to this particular talk of Dr gabor Mate it just hit that home even
further in this talk he was giving a lot of examples but he was also citing some research
and these numbers just really kind of freaked me out for example one of the studies he cited
was talking about women who were going in for a mammogram and who had recently had a lump
and they were going to biopsy or figure out whether it was cancer or benign or whatever
and so As they're going through this process they have them go through these psychological
evaluations and the results were pretty interesting the results said that if the
women had a significant stressful event happen just before the lump showed up it
didn't necessarily change the statistical outcome of whether or not it was cancer
now another thing that it showed was if women identified as feeling very lonely
and isolated that also didn't have a big statistical difference on whether
or not their lump was cancerous but if the woman had a significant stressful event and
they were isolated their chances of having breast cancer was nine times more than the
that is huge nine times more so of course that brings up the question what is the connection
between the two you've got the stressful event which is changing your psychology changing all
your body physiology your immune system your hormones all that stuff but if you
have a close support system That's there for you and cares about you
it kind of offsets some of that physiological and psychological trauma if you do not have a
support system in place all of that biological and psychological trauma
stays stuck inside your body which according to Gabor Mate ultimately will manifest into
some kind of chronic illness now another very surprising statistic that he gave he talked
about how kids with really stressed parents are five times more likely to have asthma
now of course you might be thinking well what's the connection there well kids not really just
kids but all people we feel the stress of the people around us several studies have
shown that so in polluted areas where there is more asthma it's the kids of parents who
are stressed who are most likely to and so if the parent or parents are very stressed
the kid takes on that stress sometimes even subconsciously not really even aware of it
and because they're taking all that stress on it kind of messes with their stress response
system the connection he made there was he talked about the medicines that you
give people with asthma are all medicines that simulate activating the stress response system
and so what he's saying here with with these kids with the stress parents is their stress
systems are so chronically fatigued that they're having to have medicines
to induce the stress response that they need for their body to function properly
shouldn't we be asking ourselves but if we're treating people with stress hormones
whether or not there might be connection between stress in their now just those
two statistics alone were pretty shocking to me but this last one was literally blew
my mind he was talking about a l s in the United States
it's oftentimes called Lou Garrick's Disease and this is a severe debilitating illness
which usually ends up in death within a few years of being diagnosed so we're talking
about serious serious illness here what he was saying about it is is that 100% of people who
end up with this illness have this particular personality type and characteristics about them
he was talking about how they're all sort of perfectionistic they're all Uber uber
responsible and they almost completely refused to ask for and he gave some different case studies
to support that but he even talked about Lou Garrick the baseball player who this
illness is named after he talked about Lou Garrick has these records and one of those
records baseball records which stood for 60 and 80 years and one of those records was
never having missed a baseball game now one of the things he said about
this was that Lou Garrick actually had some x-rays of his hands and and
body part as he was going through this illness and it showed that his he had
had 17 different fractures in his hands and arms over the years but kept playing anyway
he never missed a game he just suppressed and suppressed and suppressed and ultimately it
manifests itself into a terminal illness he was known as the iron
horse because he never missed a game and he didn't never miss a game because he
was never sick he was a human being he had flus and colds everybody else
furthermore being an athlete he was injured at one point his hands were x-rayed and it
turned out that his fingers had been fractured 17 separate times
and each time he would play through the injury and his teammates would
describe him as grimacing a maddened monkey in agony as he fielded the ball
but he never missed a game now if that doesn't get your attention I don't know what will there is
absolutely 100% connection between our mind and our body but not just between
our mind and our body but between our mind our body and our environment it's
all a feedback loop one thing pings off of the other which pings off of the other
now a lot of that is why my advice to you works to help your addicted loved
one because if you change yourself you change them you can't help but respond
to your environment it happens automatically but I feel I really need to stress this to
you there is a price to pay for this now I have another video where I talk about the
psychological trauma of caring about someone with an addiction but today in this video I'm
talking about the biological the physical trauma of taking care of someone who has an addiction
it's massive and for that reason I really want to encourage you on a few things number one do
not allow yourself to be abused now I have several videos where I talk about
this yes all these methods I'm teaching you I stand by them and they work but I
don't want you to continue to try to use my methods at the detriment of your own
physical and psychological health if you are being abused that's one of
those boundaries that you absolutely need to keep now I hear this all the time in
comments on my videos I hear people saying well when my loved one gets
messed up they do this and this and this terrible terrorizing mean abusive thing
and in those circumstances you need to back up and do something different this whole thing about
helping an addicted loved one it's this constant ebb and flow or balancing act between taking care
of yourself and doing what's right for them and none of us including me do it perfectly sometimes
it's really hard to figure out where that line is but if you're being abused that line is clear
do not tolerate that and another thing I really want to strongly encourage you on
is to get some support for yourself let's refer back to the statistic about breast
cancer people who had the major stressor but had support that was almost a mitigating factor for
developing cancer so please please please get some support
those women that had been stressed but were emotionally alone the stress hormone acted
on their system for months that's why they were more likely to get cancer lastly this
is something that I don't talk about much in my videos but I would tell you I would
not stay in this caretaking role of trying to get them to change forever
I really just wouldn't now I do think you have to give it a sufficient amount of time
I'm always telling you guys how this thing doesn't change overnight and there's a lot
of back and forth and you're going to have to give it some time if you want your addicted
loved one to change but that doesn't mean subject yourself to this forever
now I don't know the actual research-proven numbers on this but in my experience If you're
practicing the techniques that I'm telling you and you're doing a pretty good job at
it doesn't have to be perfect but you're doing pretty decent at it and your loved one hasn't
made a change in a year it might be time to back up because if it's not positively affecting them
and it's not positively affecting you then maybe it's time to do something different
now most of the time when you're practicing the methods that I teach you're going to
start to see little changes fairly quickly but those changes in your
loved one it's not the problem goes away immediately when I say a year
I'm talking about giving time for the trial and error and the bargaining and the trying
it their way and agreeing to get help and all those phases that come in the process
you do have to give it time but you don't have to give it forever now haven't said all that I
feel I need to give you some resources here I'm definitely going to link to the video I
was talking about in the description so if you want to watch Gabe or Matte talk about it and
he does a lot better job than I do you can click that link in the description and watch that video
I also want to tell you about our free Facebook group for family members it
doesn't cost anything and that group is pretty active you're going to get a lot of support and
advice and not only that but you're going to be getting support and advice from people who
are kind of coming from the same philosophy and mindset which I think is super helpful
and if you really want to focus on your skills and taking care of yourself you
can take a look at our membership program which is exactly for how to
take care of your practice good healthy skills and kind of get yourself back on
track now up next more from Dr Gabor Mate right here you just have to click on it