Childhood trauma and illness: what Gabor Maté argues, and what medicine establishes

A symptom, for physician Gabor Maté, is not an enemy to defeat, but a message to decode. Hungarian-Canadian, born in Budapest in 1944, author of books on trauma and addiction, he has argued for years that Western medicine fails by treating the patient as a set of separate organs, and that much illness, physical or mental, is born of childhood emotional wounds that were never tended to.

The thesis touches on a question science investigates seriously: what childhood does to the adult body. A classic 1998 study by Vincent Felitti and colleagues, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, linked childhood abuse and household dysfunction to several of the leading causes of death in adults. This supports the claim that early adverse experiences leave marks on health. Claiming that a repressed emotion causes a specific disease, such as cancer, goes beyond what medicine establishes. It is in that gap that Maté's ideas operate, and that is how this piece presents them: as one author's thesis, argued with conviction, not as a consensus finding.

What Maté calls trauma

The definition he usually gives is: “Trauma is not what happened to you. It's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”

In this reading, trauma is the closing of oneself for self-protection, the trading of authenticity for affection, the disconnection from oneself to preserve bonds. The child need not have suffered abuse or abandonment. It is enough to feel that their emotions were not welcome. The child who understands that they will only be loved if they are “good” learns to silence anger, tears, and spontaneity. That cutoff would be the invisible trauma.

Survival strategies that come due

Conditions as different as cancer, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, hypertension, depression, anxiety, addiction, and autoimmune diseases would share, in Maté's view, a past of unprocessed emotional pain. Childhood's “survival adjustments,” such as swallowing anger, hiding sadness, pleasing others, and taking on responsibilities early, would turn into patterns of illness in adult life.

The proposed mechanism is prolonged stress. Emotions suppressed for decades would overload the nervous system, the immune system, and the organs. The explanation brings in high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, associated with weakening of bones, skin, brain, and immunity, as well as changes in serotonin and the shortening of telomeres, the protective caps on DNA. The original sources give no references for these figures, and each one needs to be checked against the literature.

Women and the weight of caregiving

Maté draws attention to the fact that about 75% of autoimmune disease cases occur in women. For him, the reason would not be genetic, but social and emotional: women, historically, absorb the suffering around them, take care of the household and everyone's feelings, and end up forgetting themselves. Society demands that they erase themselves in the name of love, and the body pays the price.

He illustrates this with the case of a teacher with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, who, even with advanced symptoms, hid her pain, asked for no help, and died in silence. The refusal to admit one's own need, so as not to bother or disappoint anyone, would be common among people with degenerative diseases. The case is offered as an illustration, with no identification of the patient and no study backing it.

The question medicine would avoid

Maté criticizes treatment that simply replaces the same hormones the body stops producing under stress, without asking why it stopped producing them and what happened to that person.

The conclusion has two sides. Childhood shapes the adult, but does not condemn them. And illness would not be the fault of the person who falls ill: the sick person should not blame themselves, but take responsibility, listening to the body that says “this can't go on” and returning to themselves.