Day 2 Part 1: The Mind-Body Connection

After spending about 13 hrs in conference mood during the first day, it was time for day 2 of the conference. The highlight of the day for me was hearing Mr. Gabor Mate present live. Gabor Mate is a renowed Canadian physician and addiction expert. He is the author of the books The Myth of Normal, When the Body Says No ,and more. I have been an avid follower of Dr. Gabor Mate since watching his documentary The Wisdom of Trauma, which talks about how addictions are very often a response to fix a problem, usually trauma. It was a really eye-opening documentary and I once even held an online movie session for the members of Let's Talk Mental Health Support Group to watch the documentary together. Together with many other attendees, we had a collective moment of being star-struck and swooning at seeing Dr. Gabor talk. 🤩 He doesn't even need slides, he just needs to be there and can give a mind blowing presentation. ⭐️ There is something about Dr. Gabor, his compassion, his calm, and the way he presents himself, that has the tendency to draw me in. Dr. Gabor started his presentation about the connection between our emotions and the physical body, particularly about a study at Harvard, which showed that women with severe symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder have double the risk of ovarian cancer. He stressed about the gap between science and medicine, the studies are there, but somehow the mind and body are still seen as separate. Characteristics of people with chronic illnesses. Dr Gabor continues to to mention certain characteristics that he noticed about people with chronic illnesses. They are as follow:

1. an automatic compulsive regard for the people's emotional needs while ignoring your own. 2. The second one is what I might call a compulsive identification with duty, role and responsibility. Where your self is a person is subsumed into the role in the world. So you do not relate to yourself. You relate to your role. And you identify with your role. 3. The repression of healthy anger. The repression of anger actually represses the immune system. According to Dr. Gabor, "healthy anger is simply a boundary defense. If I were to come close to you now, too close and I invaded your space and I would not leave, despite a polite request. You better get angry with me. That's healthy anger. You're in my space, get out. Our brains are wired for it, we share circuitry for anger as with other emotional dynamics with others." "...emotions are essential for survival. So the role of emotions is to invite in what is good and keep out what is bad. Trick question for you. What is the role of the immune system? Same thing." 4. The fourth personality trait were comprised of two fatal beliefs. One is that "I'm responsible for other people's feelings". And "I must never disappoint anybody."

According to Dr. Gabor's criteria's I am the model figure for chronic illness. 🤡 These traits sounds very similar to the C-type personality type that I learned about in a psychology course for my previous degree. That personality type was correlated with bigger and thicker tumors. This makes sense though, as I have always said to others, you can't pour from an empty cup. I really believe that the more you take care of yourself, the better able you can take care of others. Attachment v.s. authenticity

He continues by saying that "No infant is born ignoring their gut feelings." Something happens along the way where the infant or child has to choose between attachment and authenticity. Attachment is our need to belong, to be held, be looked after, accepted, loved, understood, and so much more. Without that attachment relationship, no mammalian infant survives. Authenticity is our need to be ourselves. That means to be connected to our bodies and gut feelings. To know our emotions and act on them. But what happens when emotions are not allowed in a household, what happens when anger gets punished and the attachment relationship gets threathened when a child show their authentic emotions? The child gets the message that their emotions are not okay, so they have to choose between their authenticity and their attachement relationship to their caregivers. Without the attachment relationship, the child cannot survive. So what happens most of the time is that children have to give up their authenticity with all the consequences thereof.

In Dr. Gabor's own words: "In 34 years later you wonder who you are really. Who am I really. What are my own values what are my own feelings or some crisis comes along like physical or mental illness or something and you start looking for yourself all over again and why do you have to look for yourself? Because you lost yourself all those years ago in order to fit in with social expectation." The effects of trauma in women and physical illnesses Dr. Gabor concluded the session with talking about how women who are usually expected by society to repress their anger can have more risk of physical illnesses. This is reinforced by the harvard studies between stress and ovarian cancer, There is a correlation between the experiences of racism in black woman in the United States and the risk for asthma. Interestingly, Dr Gabor mentioned a study in Massachusetts that looked at 2000 women over ten year periods. The women who were mainly unhappy and didn't talk about their emotions were four times as likely to die to those women who are also unhappy but did talk about their emotions. All in all, it was a true honor to be able to be able to witness Dr. Gabor Mate speak live and I believe it is really necessary to take into consideration our whole self when dealing with physical illness. I am a firm believer that there is a strong mind body connection, and by focusing on only one part of the self, the physical, we are doing ourself a great disservice ignoring a part that is equally as important and interconnected: our mental and emotional self. To find out more about Dr. Gabor Mate, I invite you to visit: https://drgabormate.com/ For more information on the Documentary The Wisdom of Trauma, please click here: https://thewisdomoftrauma.com/, and more For the study on the association of PTSD and OVarian Cancer, feel free to visit: https://tinyurl.com/2y2vpcj