I have to confess before I begin, that I strongly buy into the school of thinking that early formative childhood experiences significantly shape our adult life. This has been my belief for a number of years based on studies I have read, people I have observed and my own personal experience. With that in mind I came across Gabor Mate’s movie ‘The Wisdom of Trauma’ and decided to watch it. I won’t call it a documentary because Mate’s work is a bit light on the science but the general premise of his message rang true for me – people are a product of their early childhood experiences and it is imperative that child’s basic physical, emotional and spiritual needs are met in order to for them to have the best chance at growing up to be a securely attached, successful and self-actualised adult.

Gabor Mate is a Hungarian-Canadian physician specializing in childhood development and the life-long impact of trauma on physical and mental health. A child of the holocaust, he was separated from his mother as she tried to save him from the Nazis in Budapest and he imagines how this early infant separation – this trauma – would have affected him. After being a physician for a number of years, in his 40s, 50s, he came to realise the impact that trauma has on the individual, and he suggests that in seeing an individual as a whole person – not just their disease, we can better help them.

The Wisdom of Trauma suggests that a parent’s responsiveness to their child’s needs create lifelong patterns and cement a relationship with self which is difficult to disrupt. A parent need not be overly abusive or cruel – even neglect of a child – providing it with things, rather than attention, is enough for a child to feel unloved, that they do not have a safe harbour in their parents, resulting in an insecure attachment to their parents. This insecure attachment style as an infant then goes on to affect future relationships.

I first heard of Mate in reading Johann Hari’s ‘Chasing the Scream’, an extremely engaging if dramatic and heavily critiqued discussion of the war on drugs in America and an argument for legalising and regulating drugs. Hari explains that Mate and other doctors suggest that the resources used to criminalise drug addicts should instead be used to provide services that will resolve their addictions. In Mate’s Wisdom of Trauma he delves into this further. As a child of the holocaust he has developed his own addiction to deal with the trauma he experienced – he compulsively buys CDs. In working with addicts from Downtown Eastside Vancouver over several decades, he finds that most of the hardcore drug addicts he treated are using drugs to deal with the trauma they have experienced, and he realised that their drug use was consequence of their emotional disturbance, not the cause of it. Mate was an advocate of humanising drug addiction and helping addicts work through their trauma and make connections with people around them so that they wouldn’t feel the need to turn to drugs to deal with the pain of their trauma.

Whilst Mate’s work is focused on drug addicts and helping them heal from their trauma, it emphasises the impact that childhood trauma has on people their whole lives. He argues that it is not the trauma itself that drives them to use substances to deal with the event – it is the subsequent trauma of no one being there to comfort them and meet their emotional needs after the event. This rings so true for me. On a personal level when I think back to traumatic events that have happened in my life as a child and young adult, it hasn’t been the trauma but the way that trusted adults in my life have responded to it and the support or lack of it that has defined the impact of that event on me. Through my lived experience it reinforces for me Mate’s claim that it is not the trauma of bad things happening to you e.g. domestic abuse, sexual assault, etc, but the subsequent trauma of your emotional needs not being met by adults around us, that cause us to turn to negative coping mechanisms.

It brings me back, again and again, to the question of what is adequate parenting? It is simply not enough to just clothe, feed, house and educate your children. We have got to do better than that. In order to raise children who have a sense of self-worth, a secure attachment style and have the skills to understand and process their emotions and form meaningful relationships with the people around them, we have to raise the bar of what we consider ‘adequate parenting’ to include meeting our children’s emotional needs. Adequate parenting is being attuned to your child’s emotional state and anticipating their emotional needs to be able to meet them – its not about what we expect from our children’s emotional intelligence at a particular age but their own individual growth and progress. Too often I have heard comments – from intelligent people – well xyz parents gave them food, shelter, educated them – what more did they want? It frightens me to think that if intelligent educated people so readily accept that a child has no emotional needs, what hope do we have for humanity? So often the people who make these comments are themselves blocking out their own emotional needs because it is too hard to see that you had emotional needs as a child and your parents who were supposed to give you love and support, failed to do that.

The next thing I wonder is – what happens when the damage is done? What happens when we have millions of broken adults reeling from traumatic childhoods where their emotional needs were not met – from a sliding scale of general neglect to starvation, physical/sexual abuse. These children grow up to be adults and then continue to have their own children perpetuating this cycle of trauma. I say stop. Do the work. Break the cycle before it is too late. Childhood trauma doesn’t always rear its ugly head in the form of drug addiction – there are many negative coping mechanisms out there and a lot of them are far more accessible than drugs. Alcohol, cigarettes, eating disorders, gambling, porn addiction, anything taken to extreme can turn into an addiction – even Yoga. Take Mate and his addiction to buying CDs. And not everyone who has a traumatic childhood will display obvious signs of this. It may be something as subtle as feeling anger towards your children for having a happier childhood than you ever did, that manifests itself in you ignoring them, or yelling at them for no reason. You don’t know why you’re angry with them or why you begrudge them their laughter with their friends and carefree happiness - but you do, because inside you the little boy who never got to laugh or play with his friends is grieving. So stop right now and do the work so that your children don’t deal with the repercussions of your childhood trauma that you never addressed.

For those of us with ageing adult parents who will never understand nor apologise for the deep pain they have caused us, it is hard to accept that your parents will never be the kind of parents you needed them to be. Perhaps they never had access to the resources that we do now, to do the work on themselves before they passed the intergenerational trauma onto you – perhaps they did and never used it. All you can do try to break the cycle before you inflict these old wounds onto the children that you bring into the world – do it for them and do it for yourself.