Gabor Maté – Healing Trauma and Addiction
Healing Trauma and Addiction, filmed before a live audience, includes video lectures interwoven with audience interaction and on-stage demonstrations with participants. Dr. Gabor Maté thoughtfully demonstrates how to develop awareness, compassion, and tools for effective healing. Families and those struggling with addiction will learn how to heal longstanding tensions and better understand each other. You will gain new insight and understanding that bring hope, optimism, and practical strategies that support long-term recovery. Participants describe their experience as life-changing, profound, and optimistic.
Episode One: The Power of Connection
Gabor Maté weaves together the role of early childhood trauma, difficulties and stresses in the household, the wounds that parents carry and inadvertently pass on to their children, as well as societal and environmental stresses. Drawing on well-documented research in biochemistry, neurology, and physiology, Gabor ‘connects the dots’ in explaining how these factors influence us and contribute to asthma, heart disease, hypertension, diseases of the gut, cancers, addiction and more. He invites us to use curiosity to explore and understand ourselves and our clients, and through this new understanding, paints a path to begin making the fundamental societal change that can positively impact the next generation.
Episode Two: A New Look At Addiction
In this episode, we look at addiction and its impact on us, both individually and as part of a family or group of loved ones. Dr. Gabor Maté’s approach to addiction requires thinking about ourselves and our experiences differently than we have in the past. Gabor introduces us to a new look at addiction and trauma.
Episode Three: Exploring Our Trauma
Gabor begins to explore trauma and how it affects us. By “us,” we mean not just the person struggling with addiction, but that person’s loved ones. And by “trauma,” Gabor is referring to particular traumas that happened to us early in life.
Episode Four: Understanding Generational Trauma
Gabor asks us to deeply examine how trauma is passed from one generation to the next. The experiences we have as children stay with us as adults. We heal, and we change our behaviors, only when we become aware of how our traumas have affected us.
Episode Five: Beyond Codependency & Victimhood
Gabor explains the concept of perception of self and others, and how our perceptions (and the things that formed them) influence how we experience the world.
Episode Six: Addiction: A Disease or a Developmental Condition?
Dr. Gabor Maté expands the discussion on how the desire to self-medicate discomfort drives addiction. We explore how early childhood experiences affect the development of impulse control and brain pathways that drive addictive behaviors. We then discuss how we break the cycle of addiction as it is passed down through families. But first we must fundamentally understand if addiction is a disease or a development disorder.
Episode Seven: Ending The Cycle of Addiction
Dr. Maté dives deeper into addressing what’s needed to support the healing of the person struggling with addiction. We look at the family and loved ones in that person’s life, and their roles. We revisit family relationships and codependency, and learn the practices that help heal the addicted brain. Gabor expands on learning longer-term steps to heal the harm that has come about (on all sides) as a result of the addiction and the underlying trauma that caused it.
Episode Eight: The Cure to Addiction
In the final episode we bring together the most important elements to attain long-term recovery from addiction. Gabor demonstrates how to cultivate a support system that helps to rebuild our brain pathways, the importance of readiness for recovery, and a review of some of the most promising psychotherapeutic approaches and additional tools that help achieve and maintain recovery.
