Coming Home to the Body: Seeing Gabor Maté Live in Toronto

On trauma, the city, and the tension between attachment and authenticity

Almost as soon as our train entered Toronto, I could feel it.

Every city, they say, has its own rhythm—an organic cadence shaped by layout, history, culture, infrastructure, and the billion-and-one ways people move through it. Some cities meander. Others bustle. Scientists have even tried to map these energies through algorithms, matching different patterns to different cities.

I don’t know where Toronto falls on that continuum, but every time I come here—even when I don’t have to drive—my muscles tighten. I brace for the avalanche of people, noise, and ragged memories. And every time, I wonder: how did I ever live here and stay sane?

Except I’m not sure I was sane back then. I certainly wasn’t the best or strongest version of myself. And although I’ve been lucky to keep some friendships from that season, most have fractured and fallen away—I can hardly blame them. For every fond memory I have of Toronto, there are at least three dark ones.

Which is why, these days, you almost have to pay me to come within twenty minutes of the city. That’s precisely what my dear friend Eleni did—though not with money. She invited me to see Gabor Maté live.

It’s hard to think of anyone who has done more to shift our collective understanding of trauma and its imprint on the body.¹ While others—Bessel van der Kolk, Bruce Perry, Peter Levien—have shaped the field, Maté’s unique ability to weave high-level research with story and imagination has made him a kind of trauma whisperer to the masses. Plus he’s honestly just funnier.

His early book When the Body Says No (o.p. 2004) helped pioneer an integrated vision of mind and body long before it was fashionable or widely accepted, arguing that prolonged emotional stress—especially in early life—can lead to chronic, even life-threatening illness. And his more recent book, The Myth of Normal (2022), pushes that idea further, arguing that perhaps the problem isn’t that so many of are “sick,” but that the world we live in is. What if the roots of our depression, autoimmune conditions, anxiety, chronic illnesses, and burnout rates are not private defects but the symptoms of a culture that so often fails to meet fundamental human needs?

Which is why Eleni and I found ourselves in Toronto. Our husbands come to the city for loud rock concerts. We—just a coupla of helping professionals (she a therapist, I a trauma recovery coach) come for the trauma celebrities.²

Our husbands come to the city for loud rock concerts. My friend Eleni and I come for the trauma celebrities.

“I told Dan this is basically the trauma therapist’s equivalent of seeing Led Zeppelin live,” Eleni joked on the train. We laughed. I admitted I’d barely slept the night before, I had been so excited.

After stepping off the GO train into the dark, smelly bowels of Union Station, we navigated our way to the PATH, the 30+ km underground walkway that connects much of downtown. After a quick bite at A\&W, we made our way to Roy Thomson Hall, where we were forced to guzzle or dump our coffees before heading into the auditorium. Our seats were better than expected: center section, less than 30 rows from the stage. A lone table and chair sat beneath the lights, waiting…

Just a coupla helping professionals who can’t want to see Gabor Maté live and in person.

As the minutes wore on, I thought about the irony of returning to Toronto—a city that holds so many of my own traumas, including a failed marriage—for a talk on trauma.

My thoughts were interrupted when, ten minutes before showtime, a ripple of applause broke out. Toward the front, a small crowd had formed. At its center, a short, bescarved man with recognizably impish posture: Gabor Maté himself, shaking hands, greeting people. With a crowd of nearly 3,000, he couldn’t greet everyone. But it he seemed intent on shaking at least a few people’s hands.

Later, as the lights dimmed, he asked the house staff not to turn them back on. “I can’t talk to people if I can’t see their faces,” he explained, bringing to mind one of a lesson from my trauma-informed coaching training: always think twice before conducting sessions without video. We need to see people’s faces. They need to see ours. “You can’t do this work blind,” our instructor had said. “Some things must be seen to be healed.”

Between attachment and authenticity

When Maté finally began, there was so much to take in. Much of it I’m still processing. But one theme stood out clearly: the lifelong tension between attachment and authenticity.

As human beings, we are wired for both. Attachment—to caregivers, partners, friends, communities—is a core human need. When that need is unmet in childhood, it leaves behind physiological scars. Maté spoke at length about how the chronic stress of disconnection can turn on genetic markers for conditions like asthma or multiple sclerosis. Our systems will do anything to avoid the pain of disconnection—make ourselves smaller, quieter, more compliant.

But we are also wired for authenticity—for the expression of our full emotional and embodied selves. We long not only to be loved, but to be known, that is, loved and recognized for who we actually are, not who we simply pretend to be. To speak honestly. To be free.

That’s the tension: many of us, especially in our formative years, learn that to stay attached, we must hide who we are. We repress our emotions, mute our preferences, and disown parts of our identity—skin colour, last names, feelings, beliefs, desires, even joy. We trade authenticity for attachment. And while that trade may have helped us survive, it carries long-term costs.

“I didn’t go through anything that traumatic,” people often say. I hear it all the time in my work. What they mean is they were never a soldier on a battlefield, were never physically beaten, or raped, or starved.

Those can be traumas, but the consistent repression of normal human emotions can also be traumatic, especially when it happens in the developmental years.

Maté shared research linking repressed emotions, particularly anger, to lowered immune responses. When we plug up anger—sometimes because we were taught to be “nice” or “easygoing”—we raise our stress hormones, especially cortisol. Over time, this leads to immune dysfunction, making us more susceptible to cardiovascular disease, digestive issues, chronic pain, depression, and more.

But because he’s Gabor Maté, he put it much more succinctly: “Repression leads to suppression.”

Our strong emotions are not the problems, they are simply messengers. They exist to help us move away from what’s bad for us, and more closer to what’s good for us, namely safety and connection. Our immune system, Maté explained, essentially does the same on a cellular level: it protects us from threats and allows us to receive what is good. Silencing our emotions confuses the whole system of who we are.

“I’m telling you, people: for all the great achievements—scientific, economic, and otherwise—of our culture, we are living in a zoo.” 🦓

What I love most about Maté is that he doesn’t just deliver facts—he tells a larger story, one that often aligns with how I see the world. At one point, he gave what sounded like a secular version of the Orthodox Christian narrative of the fall: we were wired for safety and connection—in the Ur-Beginning, and the beginning of our lives—but something happened, to all of us and to each of us, that shattered the wholeness we were made for. We live in a world that constantly confronts us with brokenness. Our systems work overtime to trying to regain the paradise that has been lost. We are breaking and rebuilding. Over and over again. We can’t do it alone.

And yet, he manages to speak of all this without hopelessness. He knows when to insert a joke, when to change the subject, when to let silence land, when to walk us away from the edge. That’s not just good speaking. It’s good trauma care.

My favorite part, though, wasn’t something he said but what he did: he kept looking at his watch. Since incessant time checking is one of my own trauma coping skills, I could identify with that.

Despite his loquacious style, Maté wasn’t one of those celebrities who wanted to listen to himself talk all night. He wanted to get us (and himself, probably) home. And though it was still nearly 2AM by the time I walked in my front door, the simple act of him keeping time made me trust him more than almost anything else that night.

Back to the zoo… 🦓

By the time Eleni and I had walked back Union Station, the quiet glow of Roy Thomson Hall was well behind us. Union was its usual assault: post-hockey-game crowds, fluorescent lights, blaring announcements. On top of that, a shrill whistle sounded every five or ten seconds—deafening, maddening, source unknown. A strange clamminess that usually portends a migraine pricked my skin.

Gabor Mate literally being whisked away by security.* Eleni and I being really mature about it. (* Have you ever seen someone whisked away by security? We saw it twice—it is a sight to behold. Probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the Rapture,** lol.) (**A theological construct of the 19th-century I do not believe in.)

I sought shelter in a washroom, hoping for quiet, but the whistle followed me in. As I washed my hands in cold water, trying to stay grounded, I turned to the other women at the sink.

“Does anyone know where that whistle is coming from?” I asked, forcing a half-smile to mask the sensory breakdown I was dancing on the edge of. (Was definitely sacrificing authenticity for an ounce of connection and acknowledgment in that moment!)

No one responded—not even a glance my way. And yes I checked: no earbuds. I asked again, a little louder this time. But my question just hung there in the air, unanswered, a little absurd. A tiny, comic moment in the overstimulated chaos of a late-night train station.

It was, to me, a kind of microcosm. A metaphor. For that city, the life I had once tried so hard to build there—the ways I had tried and never quite succeeded to be myself and find true connection there. For the night I had just spent, learning about the tension between authenticity and attachment, a tension that put words to so much of what I had lived in that city.

What more is there to do than to keep washing our hands. Keep waiting for our trains. Keep trying to move towards what is good, amid the sickness and brokenness tangled around our feet.

“What do you say we get out of this city,” Eleni said, when we finally found our train and I had told her about the weird washroom experience. “It’s been nice, but it’s time to go home.”

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UPCOMING EVENT » Happening tonight! Can’t wait to share about rebuilding wholeness after divorce for Orthodox and Eastern Christian Women! Sign up here (those who register will be sent a replay link if they can’t make it in real time.)

1. Friendly reminder: when I mention or recommend someone’s work, it doesn’t mean I endorse everything they’ve ever said or written. As a trauma professional, I intentionally engage with a range of perspectives to stay thoughtful and current in both my life and my work. We live in cultural moment that is increasingly polarized. I’m committed to reading and listening widely and thoughtfully, taking what is good with me and leaving what is not.

2. ETA (Eleni to Add): “To be fair, I have also come to Toronto for many a loud rock concert ;).”