the four compassions
Last night I went to see Dr. Gabor Mate talk about “The Four Compassions: A humane community response to addictions” at a local church. He is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he works with patients who suffer from mental illness, drug addiction and HIV, or all three. He’s written a number of books, including The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which I read last fall.
He is a tremendous speaker. Apparently he only prepared his talk as he arrived, but it was very well-structured, so he obviously gives a lot of talks. I could have listened to him for hours. Way back when, I wanted to talk about his book, but it took me a while to finish, and by the time I did, I’d lost touch with the first half of the book. His talk last night was a great refresher.
He believes that the basic, instinctual response of humans is compassion, unless experience shuts that response down. The four compassions are:
1. acknowledging the suffering of other people
2. understanding, and a drive to find out what’s behind the suffering
3. recognizing ourselves in others’ suffering
4. possibility, transformation
He also said that even referring to someone as an addict diminishes our understanding, because that is not what or who they are. They are human beings in deep suffering. He talked about InSite, the safe injection facility in Vancouver where people get clean needles and rubbing alcohol, and if they overdose, health professionals are there to revive them. He mentioned the RCMP head’s official stance on reviving people from overdoses, which is that it shouldn’t be done since it sends a message that it’s ok to use drugs. Dr. Mate said he couldn’t fault the logic of that, but if we’re going to take that stance, the entire medical system should take it, so that the workaholics who have heart attacks don’t receive bypass surgery, and the smokers don’t get antibiotics for their bronchitis. Which is just inhumane, of course.
He talked about how judgment hurts all of us, because it separates us into us and them, and denies the unity of human beings. He also said that if we find ourselves making judgments we shouldn’t feel too bad about it, because the human brain is wired to make judgments all the time. We’re just there. But the trouble comes when we believe the judgments. So the trick is just to observe the judgments without becoming attached to them. He also said we judge most harshly the things we are ashamed of in ourselves. So to serve his patients compassionately he needs to take care to deal with his own addictions (workaholism and compulsive cd shopping) so he doesn’t lash out in shame.
In the Q’s and A’s after his speech, he said that he believes nobody is beyond help. If a person is alive, then their soul is alive, and the soul is infinite possibility. He also talked about recovery, how the word recover means to find again, and you can’t find something again if it wasn’t there in the first place. What people find again when they recover is themselves, their wholeness, their infinite possibility. To do that, they need confidence, some hope of victory. And our judicial and medical systems don’t nurture that hope at all.
He ended the night answering a question about parents who let their kids cry it out to train them to sleep. Essentially, he said it wasn’t good for the child’s emotional wellbeing, even though explicit memory doesn’t begin until after age 2. But the practice teaches kids that the world is an indifferent place. He said it isn’t the child’s problem that our world requires both parents to work full-time. Now, I pretty much agree with him, to a point. And it wasn’t something that we were able to do. However, I also bristle at anything that smacks of prescribing what a mother should or shouldn’t do. Fortunately, I have the benefit of having read his book, and he did advocate that our culture needs to support mothers and families much better than it currently does. Because early experiences have such influence over a person’s brain development and later wellbeing, a mother’s job is quite literally the most important task there is. But if I hadn’t read the book, I might have left the church all set to ream somebody out for doing what they think is best for their family.
That said, I’m so glad I went to hear him speak. And I enjoyed the irony of hearing him critique certain Christian approaches up at the pulpit.
I will leave you with my memory of something he quoted at least a few times through the night:
“Do not pay attention to the things that others do or fail to do. Only pay attention to the things that you do or fail to do.”
April 15th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
I heard Dr. Mate interviewed on the CBC, and fully intended to follow up by getting that book, but didn’t. Thanks for the reminder.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Ah! Thanks for the summary. I heard him on CBC too, and he totally lost me with his ‘addiction’ to classical music. And the CIO … I don’t know. Babies are people, but they are not adult people. Remember they’re so incompetent at self-regulation when they’re born that they don’t realize their own hands are part of themselves. I wouldn’t let Munchkin cry it out at 34 months old, because *that* will leave her feeling abandoned and uncared for. But at 6 months? It was the only way she could get her sh*t together to fall asleep at night.
Um, that wasn’t the main point, was it? Oops …
Great photos.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Mimi, yes. In his book, the kinds of early experiences he mentioned were way, way more extreme than something like sleep training. I definitely wish he just hadn’t gone there.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:12 am
It doesn’t get a whole lot more loaded a topic than sleep training, does it?
Sounds like the rest of his talk was very interesting, though.
He looks a bit Leonard Cohen-ish to me. Great shots, as always.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I’ve read this book, it’s one of my favorites and recommend it often, would love to have been able to hear him talk. His discussion of pre and post natal brain development has helped me understand my own brain much better, as well as that of my children, and allowed me to be much more compassionate towards myself and others. In the past I’ve always felt less than for not being able to withstand more stress but now accept it as part of my neural wiring.
Thanks for sharing this with us, especially the part about judgments. It’s what I struggle with so much now.
April 20th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Okay, I’ll take the bait too. Having to work is not the issue with sleep training. In fact, if I were working I might be less inclined to sleep train, because being angry all the time at work is probably less of a problem than being angry all the time around my baby – which is what seems to happen to me at around the six-month mark when my babies start their waking-every-hour schedule.
And in my observation, a baby’s emotional well-being has at least as much to do with getting a good night’s sleep as it does with having a parent leap from the bed every hour to stick a soother back in his mouth. Bub, in particular, was so much happier once he stopped the wake-up-shrieking routine and actually slept for five or six hours at a time.
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:29 am
Bea, yes I agree. Dr. Mate also wrote a book with a psychologist about how important a child’s attachments with adults are, and sleep deprivation and the anger and craziness it causes (I’m speaking for myself here) threaten those attachments at least as much as a little sleep training. I’ve certainly noticed that my son is a lot more agreeable when he’s sleeping well than when he’s waking up a lot in the night.