Behind the Curtain with Gabor Maté. On Childhood, Parenting, Vocation, Marriage, Divorce & Healing

After almost 5 years of Mind Architect, we had the honour and privilege to host in our studio Dr. Gabor Maté, one of the people who inspired a lot of our work, for his first appearance on a Romanian podcast.

Many people fell in love with Gabor Maté for his mind and ideas, but most of us actually started healing because he also opened his heart.

Today we got to talk to the man behind the icon about the light and darkness that have always been part of his life. About his early childhood, teenage and adult experiences and all the things in him that needed and still need healing. Like us all, he’s still a work in progress.
Gabor Maté told us the story of his childhood and teenage years, the difficulty of moving to Canada and the changes that brought in his relationship with his parents.
He talked about his desire to become a physician as something he always knew he wanted to do. He wanted to relieve suffering. He also shared less well-known struggles, like how his ADD was a big obstacle in fulfilling his dream of becoming a medical doctor.
When it comes to his writing career, he remembers a pacient of his, a Canadian poet, who told him „You will write when you have something to teach the world”. He had, so he did!

As for his personal life, Gabor Maté shared about his life-long relationship with his wife Rae, whom he met when she was 18 and he was 22. He recalls how she saw both the light and the darkness in him and committed to dispel it. In his words, „she shouldn’t have done that, nobody should ever take dissipating someone else’s darkness as their job”.
Discover what made their relationship last and how they managed to get through times in which it seemed like there was no hope left.

During this one hour conversation, we look at the intersection between man, child, father, husband and the professional who later became one of the most influential voices on trauma, ADD and addiction, all of them subjects on which he shared his views with us. Join us in this journey.

This episode is produced with the support of Banca Transilvania.

0:00 Intro & Key Moments
1:58 Introduction into Compassionate Inquiry România with Cristina Bâră
13:35 Introduction of Dr. Gabor Maté
14:35 Gabor Maté as a child and teenager under the hungarian communist regime
17:50 Gabor Maté's relationship with sports and physical movement
18:48 Most important needs to have been met as a teenager and the relationship with his parents during that time
20:30 The impact of moving to Canada
22:00 The impact of dislocation caused by emigration and/or having parents absent
24:50 How can we better manage the needs of children with ADHD
28:23 About Scattered Minds (Minți Împrăștiate)
29:55 Schools need to change the way they support children with ADHD
31:55 Gabor Maté on vocation. Why he always knew he wanted to be a doctor
33:06 How ADHD made his becoming a doctor even harder
35:00 The red thread between Gabor Maté's professional roles
36:40 Gabor Maté on addiction ahd his own addiction to work
40:48 The work on his addiction, once aware of it
41:50 The story of the relationship with Rae, Gabor's wife
43:55 Similarities and differencies in the relationship
44:44 We marry people who carry the same level of trauma that we have
46:30 Men are looking for women who can mother them. What are the problems with that and how did that apply in Gabor's relationship with Rae
50:35 How did Gabor and Rae navigate the moment of contemplating divorce
52:15 1/2 people who get married get divorced. What helped them stay together
55:40 The opportunity to heal together with the partner
57:15 The most important moments in Gabor's healing process
59:10 Healing has to happen in the mind, the heart, the gut and the whole body
01:03:40 Gabor's relationship with money throughout his life and in his marriage
01:07:35 On Gabor and Daniel Maté's next book, Hello Again
1:10:00 On the impact of screens and Social Media on children's brain development and wellbeing
1:13:00 Closing thoughts. On Palestine and "Tales of the Hasidim" by Martin Buber