HOW CHILDHOOD TRAUMA EFFECTS ADULT MINDS
Dr Gabor Mate’s Interview on Scotland Tonight
Have you ever wondered how your past experiences could be impacting your life today?
Throughout training as a Rapid Transformational Therapy Practitioner the focus was always getting to the root cause of a clients issues by going back to their childhood. The core belief of RTT is that almost all of our adult issues have their beginnings in childhood trauma. It has certainly been my experience that the defining trauma’s my adult clients bring up are rooted in experiences they had from the ages of 0-12 years old.
Trauma doesn’t need to be something as destructive as you might imagine, it can quite often begin with experiences at school through a thoughtless comment made by a teacher or student in the classroom or playground, at after school activities, during time spent with extended family or friends etc where children can be inadvertently humiliated or ignored.
If the outcome of an interaction, or lack of interaction, impacts the child and creates a feeling of fear, shame, guilt, distress, not being lovable enough or accepted, not able to have the things they want and not being good enough, a child will unconsciously develop coping mechanism. Those coping mechanisms are designed to help the child in the short term but unfortunately, they don’t disappear as the child grows.
In modern medicine, when a health issue arises, it is treated and can be explained as genetics, stress related, due to an addiction, due to another underlying health issue etc, but rarely is the persons childhood traumas considered in the equation.
In this video, Dr. Gabor Mate, an addiction specialist, shares how through extensive research and decades of his own work, he has repeatedly worked with patients old unresolved childhood traumas and seen amazing healing take place.
Dr Gabor has been speaking up about how important it is that we look to the childhood traumas in the understand the adult heath issues for decades. Even with countless studies that support his work, he still comes up against resistance. He has seen, as Marisa Peer and RTT practitioners have seen, that by working on past traumas, healing the root cause, we can see powerful ripping effects on the health and happiness of adults.
So many of us dont know how to get motivated to study, or how to get motivated to lose weight, or quit a bad habit and blame it on laziness or having too much stress when it is much more likely to go back to a defence mechanism that was created by your brain in your childhood.
In this recent interview, Dr Mate is put to the test by STV’s Rona Dougall on Scotland Tonight. He graciously holds his own and eloquently explains just how important it is to not only recognise where our adult habits, blocks and health issues come from but also how mindful we must be around our children, as he explains how even the most loving parents can effect the long term health of their children.
Take it away Dr Gabor Mate and huge thanks to STV’s Rona Dougall on Scotland Tonight for this informative interview.