Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.
Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from wisdom teachers around the world.
Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.
Mallory: Thus the name, Just One Question.
Chris: We hope you enjoy.
For today’s question, Mallory, I want to bring in a voice that a lot of people listen to when it comes to trauma, and that is Dr. Gabor Maté.
Mallory: Oh yeah, he’s incredibly popular in the trauma space — addiction too.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. In the realm of Hungry Ghosts — it’s one of my favorite book titles.
Mallory: Yeah, spooky.
Chris: Spooky, poetic. And he does amazing work in that space. This might not be totally related, but I do want to share — I remember a story he shared through Sounds True, where he led a group of patients on an ayahuasca retreat in South America, and when he tried to go through the ceremony himself, the local healers stopped him. They said, “You’ve got some dark stuff going on. We can’t let you bring that in here.”
Mallory: Oh, okay — he was too much for the ayahuasca healers.
Chris: Right, right, which I could see. I mean, he’s intense. He’s gone through a lot of stuff, and he works with a lot of really dark issues. So in this episode of Insights at the Edge, he actually does a great job of linking people’s lack of compassion to their own pain. He says that some of the most sensitive people he’s known are the very ones who turn around and cause pain to other people. He’s met people in prison, and he says they are surprisingly some of the most sensitive people.
Mallory: So there’s this connection between your own trauma and how you treat others, which makes a lot of sense.
Chris: Totally makes sense. And then the sensitivity piece — you get that trauma because you’re a more sensitive person.
Mallory: Right, right.
Chris: Yeah.
Mallory: Well, here’s Tami Simon asking Gabor Maté: What keeps me from being more compassionate?
Chris: Stay with us.
Tami Simon: You quote A.H. Almaas—a friend of ours—several times in The Myth of Normal and that really got my attention, really helped deepen my understanding, and I want to pull out one of them here: “Lack of compassion is a suppression of hurt.”
Gabor Maté: Yeah.
Tami Simon: And I thought this was really an important lightbulb moment for me. Even here, when I’m talking about not being compassionate toward my own development, and how long it’s taking me to grow in certain ways, and the frustration I feel underneath it — I’m just like, I’m just so hurt, I can’t believe I’m still going through all of this. “Lack of compassion is a suppression of hurt.” So I wonder if you can explain that more for people.
Gabor Maté: Well, [he] — as you know, and as we’ve discussed — is one of my great teachers, mostly through his writings. I’ll quote another teacher of mine who’s no longer alive, sadly. His name is Jaak Panksepp. He was an affective neuroscientist, which means he studied the neuroscience of emotions. He points out that our brains are wired for a whole slew of emotions — we have brain circuitry for various emotions, which include grief, fear, loss, anger, caring, curiosity, playfulness, and so on. We’re born with these systems in place in our brain. They need to develop, but they’re there, and we share them with other mammals.
So care — which is, if you want to put it in different words, compassion for the vulnerable — is what helps a parent look after the helpless infant. It’s wired into us. So it’s unnatural for it not to be there. So what happens? Caring is vulnerable. If I care for you, then if you suffer, or die, or — let’s say suffer — that hurts me. So for caring, there has to be vulnerability.
But what if I was really hurt when I was small? So hurt that I can’t stand being vulnerable? Then, out of self-defense, my care system will shut off. And then the capacity to care, to be compassionate, is to that degree limited. In the case of psychopaths and sociopaths, it’s even totally obscured and disabled — all because of vulnerability.
It’s very interesting what I can tell you about people who’ve committed murder. If you go into prisons — I don’t know if you’ve done this or not, but I’ve run a number of projects that go into prisons and work with lifers who’ve killed people — once they work through their stuff, they become the sweetest, most gentle people in the world. Unbelievable. I’ve seen people on death row like that. So have others — anybody who’s worked with prisoners will tell you this.
Now, what does that mean? It means they’re so shut down to caring that they could kill another human being, and that came out of a deep hurt. And the more sensitive you are by nature, genetically, the more hurt you’re going to be. Some of the worst criminals are the most sensitive people in the world. And by sensitive, I don’t mean that they’re aware of and care for the feelings of others. I mean that they were born so sensitive that they were hurt much more easily than others. They felt more — when they were hurt, they felt more. The more they felt, the more pain they felt. The more pain they felt, the more they had to shut down. The more they shut down, the less compassionate and the more cruel they became.
Once those of them who can work through their pain and their trauma actually become very sweet and loving people — I’ve seen this repeatedly, and so have many others. So that’s an example of what Almaas was talking about: that a lack of compassion is based on a hidden hurt.
Some people are just born more sensitive than others, and that means certain chemical messengers in their brains are configured differently. And it means that when these people are well treated, they become creators and artists and leaders and shamans — whoever, joyful. But when they’re hurt, they’re traumatized all the more.
There’s a pediatrician — Canadian-born, but now working in California — named W. Thomas Boyce, who wrote a book called The Orchid and the Dandelion. It’s about the very sensitive kid and the less sensitive kid. The less sensitive ones can endure a whole range of experiences and not be so hurt by it, but the more sensitive ones are hurt more.
So I think that’s what’s genetic. When people talk about genes for addiction, or genes for mental health issues — no. What they’re actually finding are genes for sensitivity, which means that the environment acting on those sensitive genes will create more pain. And all addictions, and all mental health conditions, in my view, are ways of coping with pain. So the more sensitive you are, the more prone you are to fall into one of those diagnostic categories — not because the genes dictate those categories, but because the sensitivity potentiates the pain you’re trying to escape from. That’s my understanding.
Chris: There is so much more with Dr. Gabor Maté in this episode of Insights at the Edge. We encourage you to go listen to the full episode at soundstrue.com, wherever you listen to podcasts, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s also available on our premium membership platform, Sounds True One — you can learn more about that at join.soundstrue.com. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.
