September 24, 2026

What Happens Inside You

Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.

Gabor Maté offers this definition in The Myth of Normal, his 2022 examination of how modern life generates illness and disconnection. He writes from decades as a family physician in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where he treated people living with severe addiction, and from his own history of infant trauma during the Nazi occupation of Budapest. Maté came to see that his identity as a tireless, ever-available doctor was itself a trauma response, a way of proving his worth by endlessly giving to others. He teaches that real service to others cannot rest on an unexamined wound; it has to start with the willingness to see what that wound actually did inside you.