As well as hearing Dr Stephen Porges talk this month, I was also incredibly lucky to attend Dr. Gabor Maté’s talk on hidden stress and its costs to our health. Dr Maté is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician with a background in family practice, palliative care and addiction. He has a special interest in childhood development and trauma, and in their potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health. Here’s a lovely summary of his talk from How To Academy who hosted Dr Maté:
“It was a rare privilege to host as wise, humane and compassionate figure as Dr. Maté. From Bertie to Brexit, the origins of lung cancer to the shortcomings of the mind-body model of biomedicine, Dr. Maté spoilt us for richness of thought and insight. But if we could distil his message to a single takeaway it would be this: we need to love our children unconditionally, and break the cycle of emotional repression that has led to so much sickness and unhappiness being passed down through the generations”.
Dr Maté has a way of delivering some incredibly serious messages in a compassionate, informed and at times, appropriately humorous way. He has written a range of books – I particularly recommend "When The Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress", and I absolutely recommend you listening to him speak, if not in person, via his many talks that are available on You Tube.