TFN Talks with Daniel B Mate
TFN Talks had the honour of sitting down with Daniel B Mate, an award winning musical theatre composer, lyricist, playwright and co-author of National and #1 New York Times Bestselling Book The Myth Of Normal: Trauma, Illness And Healing In A Toxic Culture. We spoke about his life, music and his mission to help people align their minds through the world’s first mental chiropractic service ‘Walk with Daniel’.
Daniel, besides being an author, you are a composer, lyricist, and playwright for musical theatre. How did your journey in music start and develop over time?
Music’s been a part of my life pretty much since the beginning. My earliest memories of growing up in Vancouver have my parents’ LP collection in the foreground: everything from Elton John to French-Canadian folk music to the Fiddler On The Roof cast album. Apparently my folks first clued into my aptitude for the thing when, at age four or something, I would stand at the piano, head not even at keyboard level, reach up and play along with or harmonize to Beatles songs. Either way, it turned out I had perfect pitch and an innate feel for music. I started taking piano lessons at age 5, and while I enjoyed the ‘making beautiful sounds’ portion of it I always bucked a bit at the ‘practicing to get great at it’ part. I also had a strong drive to write my own music, which the Soviet-born Jewish married couple who were my teachers—lovely, kind people, but grounded in the classical tradition—weren’t as inclined to encourage and nurture.
Later, music was a major aspect of the socialist Jewish summer camp I loved going to, and I ended up writing a lot of music and lyrics in that setting, including my first experience writing musicals. Even then, though, musical theatre didn’t occur to me as something I’d ever want to pursue: maybe it was that I didn’t like the sound of most Broadway stuff, or just thought it was unhip at a time when I was obsessed with heavy metal, grunge, hip hop, and other “edgy” forms. Probably, on a subconscious level, I was scared of the sincerity and vulnerability associated with it. Around seventeen I started playing guitar, mainly because it clicked that piano’s not a practical way of impressing chicks around a campfire. By the time I entered undergrad, I was writing my own songs in the singer-songwriter vein, inspired by everyone from Ani DiFranco and Indigo Girls to Soundgarden and the like. I even recorded an album of original tunes and had CDs produced. My songs were generally very emotionally intense and wordy and musically ambitious. On one level I was deeply proud of them; on another, more dominant level, embarrassed and sheepish. So most of those 2000 CDs remained in boxes in my parents’; basement— probably some are still there! At the same time I was heavily involved in theatre at McGill, both acting and directing. My studies were in Psychology, but my heart was in the arts. The discrepancy led me to a kind of nervous breakdown and dropping out in my fourth year. That episode further soured my attitude toward the possibility of doing any of these creative things professionally, which I was already ambivalent about.
Ultimately things came somewhat full circle in my late twenties, when I realized that the main thing holding me back from putting music at the center of my life was just good old fashioned self-doubt, plus some weird sort of resistance to committing my life to something I love with a passion (go figure.) That’s also when I stopped battling my mom’s supportive suggestion that I train professionally as a musician, composer, theatre artist, writer—”something, Daniel!”—and lo and behold, discovered that NYU had a Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Somehow, at age 28, I was finally ready to give in to the obvious: that even though I hadn’t been a musical theatre kid, at the intersection of these two art forms I loved, music and theatre, there should be a place for me to set up shop and make something really cool and exciting. So I moved to New York—another place I’d always longed to be—and did the program, and developed two major new skills: how to write songs that move character and story forward, and how to collaborate artistically, making space for other people’s voices to enhance mine, and vice versa. Ego cross-training, I call it. I’ve been writing musicals ever since.
I’ve been reading up on you and it’s been quite fascinating. You are a man of many many talents and you have achieved highly in your fields of interest. Am I right to assume that you were a gifted child growing up? Did you always allow yourself the freedom of pursuing multiple disciplines and career paths or was it something you ever struggled with - having to choose one or the other? What was this experience like for you?
The multi-hyphenate life isn’t for everyone, but me and it seem to be quite compatible. In fact, it seems downright mandatory since the thought of having one single job title, especially within any sort of institution, still makes me queasy. I love being able to bounce between different endeavors, channeling my calling in multiple ways. Practically speaking it also means I can supplement the less lucrative aspects of what I do—particularly writing musicals, where they say you can make a killing but not a living—with other things that do bring in some reliable income. That’s probably the case for most people in that field, but many of them either keep their “money gigs” in and around the arts, or they get day jobs having nothing to do with what they’re really interested in. I’ve been fortunate to be able to spread out beyond music and theatre without having to do anything I dislike.
At the same time, you’re right, there are challenges. There have been times when I’ve longed for the stability that my friends with ‘straight jobs’ have. More troublingly, I’ve sometimes felt pulled in way too many directions, lacking a core sense of what it is that links all my various job titles. I think that’s important for someone like me: operating from a sense of unified purpose, no matter what I’m up to at any one time. I’m more and more clear on what that is for me, and it has to do with doing work that leaves people experiencing life in a more crystalline way: clarifying things, going from opaque to a more translucent experience, making things more precise and precious somehow. As long as I insist on that being the guiding alignment principle, the North Star of my choices and how I move through the world, I find myself feeling a sense of coherence even when I’m doing a bunch of things. Of course, it requires that I keep my own “crystal vision” (to twist a Stevie Nicks line) as clear as possible.
The other thing is keeping proportional priorities. As much as I value my work with my dad, for instance, and feel very fortunate to be able to do it, there is nothing, nothing, NOTHING that feels as “me” as putting musicals together and collaborating with other theatre artists. It’s nice that I don’t currently have to choose between all my various kinds of work, and that the variety of pursuits helps me afford to make art, but it helps to know that if the chips were down and I had to choose, the choice wouldn’t take me more than a second to make. That’s where my heart rests most comfortably and what I’d most like to be known for.
Like you, I have grown up with a father who is very well known and respected in his field. I know that it comes with its own specific ‘light and shadow’ that not many people can relate to and understand. My question for you is, what has your experience growing up as your father’s son has been like as far as you are willing to share it, and how has it shaped your direction in your life and career choices?
You’re right about the light and the shadow. As far as the light side goes, since a young age, I’ve taken pride in and felt admiration for my dad’s willingness to step out on principle and speak unpopular truths and views. This was before he had much renown as an expert on trauma or healing— he was moderately well-known in Canada for his medical columns and his unorthodox takes on things like addiction, the origins of disease, medical norms, and so on. Back then, he was maybe most notorious for his far-left political views, including advocating for Palestinian rights and speaking out against Israeli crimes at a time when to do so was to be called a traitor by the Jewish community. I idolized that aspect of him, even as I was frightened by the righteous rage with which he could sometimes erupt when attacked. His fame as an author and speaker has really only happened in my adulthood. Still, when I was a kid I was aware of how important he was to his patients, and that tied right into the shadow side of things because that popularity was inseparable from his workaholism, and naturally I and my siblings and mother bore the brunt of the negative consequences of that at home. And of course, that was connected to the deeper shadows of his personality, the soul holes you might say, whose manifestations I knew all too well. I think the upshot of all this was a sharp split in my view of him: on the one hand an appetite to be associated with him, especially to the extent that I doubted my own worth as an individual; on the other, discomfort and sometimes disgust with what I deemed to be hypocrisy, the emperor having no clothes and so on. I know now that underneath all of that is heartbreak stemming from deep disappointment, and under that is undying love and a longing for the wonderful, attentive father I got to have only sporadically.
I mentioned my self-doubt being correlated with all that, and I think that’s been the thing that’s most scrambled my signals about my own path in life. It’s not like I ever wanted his sort of fame, but I do have a desire to actualize my purpose like he has his, and it’s often been frustrating that my progress has so often felt like a “go-go-stop” game I never consciously chose to play. We have very different personalities—he’s got the constitution that made him a driven, public-facing workaholic doctor and a strong advocate for his even stronger beliefs, while I have an artistic temperament that traffics in sensitivity, introversion and ambivalence (as in seeing things multiple ways at once), which are great strengths but can also be self-defeating.
And then of course there’s the direct link between his public work and my recent collaborations with him, which have expanded the playing field of my career considerably.
Daniel B Maté with his father Dr. Gabor Maté. Together they wrote the National Bestseller ‘The Myth of Normal’, published by Penguin Randomhouse.
I discovered you through the book your co-wrote with your father ‘The Myth of Normal’, which I think is safe to say one of the greatest books on trauma and psychology I have ever read. How did this collaboration come about? Was it in any way challenging to work together?
I’m glad you found it so valuable. It came about as a kind of leveling-up of a longstanding role I’d played, editing his writing— if you go back to In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he credits me as the ‘front-line editor’, meaning I touched up the prose, helped tighten some arguments, and added a few choice lines of my own. For Myth, which he’d been toiling away at without actually writing much for about six years, I read his very long, very dense book proposal and knew right away that I could make this book a lot more readable, persuasive, and accessible, but that I’d have to be in a (credited) co-writing seat to do it. Fortunately, he welcomed me aboard— I think his words were ‘I was hoping you’d say that’.
The collaboration was in some ways challenging, but in every way worth it. The funny thing was, I’m sort of an expert collaborator from all my years writing musicals, which may be one of the most collaborative art forms out there. Once you know how to write a song for a character moment with someone else and make it sound and feel like a singular voice, writing a prose book isn’t such a leap. My dad, on the other hand, has mostly been a solo writer, with the exception of his book with Gordon Neufeld, on which Gabor did most of the actual writing based on Gordon’s ideas. The main challenge was that when we’re under stress, we trigger each other along familiar lines, lines that trace back to a painful history. And he was stressed a lot: overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, anxious about how it would be received, and at first somewhat territorial when it came to the tone and style of the book. His blood pressure, which normally is remarkably low, was shooting up. At one point I told him that I wouldn’t work with him unless he got a therapist, which ironically has been one of the last things he thinks to do when he’s struggling. (He’s gotten a lot better at asking for support of late, I should add.)
Being around my dad’s stress did numerous things to me, and sometimes I would react with exasperation or rage or judgment. At the same time, I got to see a more human, relatable side of him in the process. After all, he was being neurotic about a cherished creative project, one he knew had massive potential but ultimately he doubted whether the world wanted it, and by extension him, and whether he had what it took. ‘Don’t worry about it’, I would half-joke, ‘you don’t. That’s why I’m here.’ But the point is, I can relate to that. I can also relate to being the ‘difficult one’ in the collaboration: when I work on musicals, if there’s ever conflict, it’s usually me acting out and letting my ego get in the way of professionalism. I’ve gotten much, much better at that, and so I felt I had something to offer my dad not just in terms of the product but the process, even to the point of modeling a different way of communicating and thinking about the work. As a kid that would have been too heavy a burden and too much of a role reversal, but doing it as a grown-up gave me a good feeling, and also a clearer sense of separation.
That’s the other thing: writing the book together was like scaffolding for completing some of the unfinished business between us. I had to differentiate myself from him in order to do it, and by doing it I got to prove to myself once and for all that my contribution is unique and necessary— literally no one else could have pulled this off, he and I agree. And as far as dealing with conflict, for the first time we had a reason outside ourselves to move through disagreements powerfully, because it wasn’t about us anymore: it was about this book and the difference it was going to make. Which didn’t immunize ourselves from bickering, but it greatly sped up the process of getting back on track. And that’s a great skill to build: making something more important than the same old same old.
“Healing isn’t a destination, it’s a direction: a movement toward wholeness.”
The Myth of Normal is such an impressive book that when I was thinking of asking you questions about the material covered in it I did not know where to start. I guess the one question I will ask that I think would be beneficial to my readers would be: What is or are the most potent healing practices you have discovered for yourself, which we can perform on ourselves to begin addressing childhood trauma and rewriting patterns of behaviour which may not serve us in adulthood?
I appreciate the question but I wouldn’t presume to suggest this or that healing practice to anyone. Healing means different things to different people, and I find that the massive popularization of the language around trauma and healing these days (and the marketplace for products and services catering to it) has its own dark side. I know what’s worked for me better than other things, but that’s me. If I know someone and am clear on what they’re dealing with and what they’re looking for, I sometimes make suggestions, but that’s about it. Nothing is for everyone, and it’s unwise to look for too many universals: I think wisdom may be more local than that, more tailored to what’s actually going on and what’s troubling someone.
There are some principles of healing that I think generalize pretty broadly, and we go into them in some detail in the book. That was one section that I made some significant contributions to in terms of the ideas presented, as opposed to, say, the scientific and medical information. For instance, healing isn’t a destination, it’s a direction: a movement toward wholeness. That’s going to look different for everyone. And healing, I think, wants to happen— we can get on board or we can resist it, but we can’t force it (which is just the flipside of resistance, because we’re resisting or even rejecting the way things are now.) The larger point is that healing responds to certain kinds of attitudes and willingnesses in us, and is allergic to others. I think always being willing to ask ‘what am I not seeing clearly?’ and then really being open to not knowing the answer is one beneficial approach. That’s what my dad would call compassionate curiosity. Also staying away from blame, especially self-blame.
Drawing on your experience sitting with the plant medicine Ayahuasca, can you talk about the benefits of plant medicine therapy on individuals with trauma and the risks? I did a lot of research on ayahuasca before sitting in my first ceremony in the Amazon and I remember the profound effects it had on some of the people in my retreat who were struggling with opioid addiction and childhood trauma. Can you share a bit about your personal experience?
I may not give you the answer you’re hoping for here...
I’ve sat in probably 30 or 40 ceremonies in several countries. It’s a powerful modality and a beautiful tradition, as long as it’s done in a context that honors that tradition and knows its ways. Certainly it gave me access to experiences of my own consciousness and of cosmic reality (for lack of a better term) that were powerful, mind-expanding, and that I’ll never forget. I got to feel certain kinds of bliss I’d never known before, as well as going to the depths of my darker parts. I experienced myself as connected to something much vaster and more powerful than my ordinary mind states can grasp. I learned important lessons in humility, trust, endurance, letting go of control, releasing things (often into a bucket), and love.
At the same time, for all the peak experiences I had, I can’t say for certain what got ‘healed’ in those ceremonies. Some things got revealed, and some insights were accessed. I touched into certain tantalizing possibilities. But I’ve found that that doesn’t equal actual healing, which happens back in the world I actually live in, not on some heightened plane of consciousness. And as much as I sat in many integration circles after ceremony—I even led some—I don’t know how well I was able to integrate the learnings into my life. They would often just be reabsorbed into my normal way of operating, maybe with a more open mind than before. I’m speaking in the past tense because I haven’t participated in over four years now, and there’s nothing in me that feels called back to it at the moment.
There’s another factor that’s particular to my relationship with that medicine, which is that I was married for two years to someone who was deeply immersed in that world, and who in fact had been a therapy client of my father’s in the ayahuasca context. By marrying me and taking my name she became associated with him, and ended up getting a job in Peru at an ayahuasca center, which took her away from our Vancouver life maybe half the time. It became clear very quickly that that’s where she’d wanted to be all along, whether she knew it or not, and the marriage couldn’t survive that. And it broke my heart. Last I heard she’d had a kid with a shaman down there who she’d studied with, which almost sounds like a clichéd ending, but it’s what happened. I’m not trying to play the victim in this sad story— for one thing, it’s a lot more complex than I’m telling it, and moreover I’m the one who walked right into this situation, in fact I completely co-created it. My delusions were my own, as were the unconscious needs fueling them.
The point is that a big part of my participation in the plant medicine world was due to hers, and that I wasn’t always doing it for my own authentic reasons but rather to try to solidify our shaky bond. Looking back I’m sad about how desperate I was to be important to someone and how much I overlooked. So there are those associations, and a very strong determination to never again fall into any sort of group activity that isn’t 100% aligned with my authentic intentions and choices. On the more positive side, I have really fallen in love with what it’s like to have small victories in my life, the little ‘aha’ that everyday life can produce if we’re paying attention, without having to beam onto some other planet. That way it’s a lot easier to integrate the lessons, because they occurred in the same mind that I inhabit every day. And when I can see actual results in my life—old reactions giving way to new responses, letting go of old stories that cause suffering, new tricks for this old dog—that’s my favorite thing.
Can you tell us about your Mental Chiropractic practice and how it came about?
‘Mental Chiropractor’ was how someone described me once in a group setting, and I liked it so much I kept it. Actually what’s interesting is that it was in an ayahuasca context, back when I was working alongside my (then) wife who was doing integration/therapy in the style of my father. That style of working with people—taking them back to their deepest wounds and patiently helping them connect the dots—was never really my jam, as much as I admired my dad’s abilities. This participant actually said, ‘You know, you’re really not like your father at all in how you work with people. You’re not a therapist. You’re more of a mental chiropractor’. What I loved about that, aside from the fact that it felt nice to be seen as my own person and not just a Gabor knock-off, was that it captured what I find the most compelling about working with people: making quick, powerful, consequential adjustments to their stuck ways of looking at things. The same way a chiropractor aims to ‘adjust’ the spine to bring the body more into alignment so that it can function at its optimal level, I’m doing that with the mind, as a way of bringing thoughts and emotions into alignment with a person’s true intentions. I love the moment when something goes from stuck to not stuck in a person’s perceptual world, when things go from muddy to crystalline simply through looking at something in a genuinely different way.
What that requires, of course, is first of all honing in on something specific. I can’t help you with your ‘commitment issues’ writ large, but I can help you look at an actual situation where you not committing is messing you up right now. A place where the rubber of your patterns meets the road of your life. Next, it takes setting a strong intention, because when we’re stuck, there’s a part of us that’s content to stay there. And then it requires that we be willing to find out how we’re already looking at the situation, to actually see our own point of view for the first time as a point of view.
Because until we see it as a point of view, it doesn’t look or feel like one: it just looks like the truth, like how things are. We don’t see the virtual reality helmet we have on, we only see what it shows us, and as long as we believe it, the range of possibilities is severely limited. The minute we realize that what we’re stuck inside of is only one of many possible viewpoints, and that it’s rife with faulty assumptions and stale beliefs that are coming from a long time ago, things open up. So my job is basically to a) help the client form a positive intention that will power them through to something new; b) show them the fixed point of view that has them stuck in the situation; c) have them see the glaring flaws in it, the things that don’t add up, the glitches in their own matrix.
The way I deliver this mental chiropractic service is by taking walks with people. Literally. That’s why I call it “Take A Walk With Daniel”. If we’re in the same city, we do it in person, which means the vast majority of my clients aren’t in person, they’re by phone: they walk wherever they are—Barcelona, Melbourne, Saudi Arabia, Toronto—and I walk in my Brooklyn neighborhood, or wherever I happen to be. There’s something about moving through space that’s naturally conducive to shifting one’s mental perspective.
I’m very clear with people that I’m not a therapist. Many clients respond to that with a sigh of relief, actually. Nothing against therapy—it’s an ongoing requirement in my own life, believe me—but I’m offering something different. It’s not a gentle, patient kind of listening, for one thing. I don’t just sit there and nod and offer affirmation and then say ‘see you next week’— if I have to see you next week, I didn’t do my job, which was to support you in getting unstuck NOW. Also, I’m not going to get into the distant past with you. My approach is definitely trauma-informed, it’s just not trauma-focused. I take for granted that anyone who comes to me is carrying wounds from long ago, and that those wounds are showing up in some way in the situation that has them stuck now. If we need to touch on that history just to lighten things up a bit, to say ‘Hey, you come by this honestly, it didn’t start last week’, then we do that. But we don’t hang out in the backstory, because that’s not going to leave you with a crystal clear new perspective about now. The danger with therapy is that we can become tenured experts on the subject of ourselves, our pain, our emotions, and so on, but still remain unable to shift what there is to shift if we want genuinely different results in our lives. I want to go beyond that, give someone a taste of real victory in the present, even if it seems like a small victory. When it comes to breaking old patterns of perception and reaction, there are no small wins.
So yeah, I love doing it. I get to be super straight with people, and have some really bold and candid and inspiring conversations. And, I wouldn’t want to do it full-time. It’s a great way to get myself out of the house once a day, get my legs moving, and get my attention off myself.
“Talking sensitively about mental health or posting memes about it on Instagram is very different from doing what it takes to create a world that collectively supports it.”
In your opinion what is the current state of society? Are we moving in the right direction when it comes to mental health?
I actually have no idea how to answer that. Probably the answer is yes, and no, and everything in between. And it depends on who you mean by ‘we’. There’s a growing awareness that people are in pain, and greater disillusionment about the notion that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ and all of capitalism’s other mantras lead to actual happiness for most people. That’s good. Our book wouldn’t have been a bestseller ten years ago, I’m sure of it. So on one hand that speaks to the shift in consciousness, but it also speaks to the deep need and hunger for the kind of insight that can lead to healing. So on the individual level, there may be a greater opening now than ever before. At the same time, if by ‘society’ you mean the levers and institutions of political and corporate power, the factors that create the context for our material lives, then I’m not particularly optimistic. Talking sensitively about mental health or posting memes about it on Instagram is very different from doing what it takes to create a world that collectively supports it. And the fact is that the sort of capitalism we live under—individualistic, alienated, exploitative, divisive, and more and more radically unequal—isn’t good for people’s well-being, physical or mental. And of course, the further down the socioeconomic ladder a person or group is, the less time and energy they may have to do ‘healing work’.
But ultimately I’m not sure where that question gets us. Maybe society’s on the right track, maybe it’s doomed. Either way, we each have to keep working to make our lives more sane, more connected to reality, more truthful. And we have to keep an eye on each other and do what we can to make our surroundings more hospitable to people living their fullest lives as human beings. I think of what the rapper Mos Def, who these days goes by the name Yasiin Bey, said about hip hop: something like ‘hip hop’s not some giant living in the countryside, coming down to visit the townspeople. If you want to know where hip hop’s at, ask yourself, ‘Where am I at? How am I doing?’ ‘We’re’ not separate from society— we’re its creations, yes, and we’re very much subject to its limitations, but we’re also taking part in its creation every moment of our lives.
What is a life well lived according to Daniel B Mate?
Words like calling, intention, creation, and alignment come to mind. If I can go through my life with a clearer and clearer sense of what my life is for, creating opportunities to make good on that purpose and building the skill of living in integrity with it—making that intention more important than anything else, and being willing to lose everything in service of my calling—I think I’ll be able to look back gratefully and say I did this life thing the way it’s designed, treated it with some love and reverence, made good on this brief, miraculous kick at the consciousness can I was given.
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