This is part of a series of reflections by Paul Sinclair, one of the managing directors of Mind Matters. Drawing on his experience in high-pressure environments and his training with Dr Gabor Maté, Paul writes with unflinching honesty about the patterns he sees in his work with clients and in his own life. In this piece, he reflects on his personal lessons learned from training with Gabor over the course of several years.
The Beginning Was Not the Beginning.
When I first began training with Dr Gabor Mate, the renowned trauma and addiction expert, it was not in a room lined with books and candles, but through the sterile intimacy of a screen. Our work was entirely online, a strangely modern portal to something profoundly ancient. The space between us was digital, but the process was unflinchingly human. And in that space, a war that had long been waged inside me began to lose its grip.It’s not the kind of war fought with guns, I wouldn’t know; we used torpedoes. I served aboard HMS Conqueror during the Falklands War, deep in the quiet, cold cathedrals of the sea.
That part of my life and my childhood shaped everything that came after. Sailor. Engineer. Therapist. Father. Husband. Patient. Plant medicine facilitator/healer. Each identity is a precision-made mask, worn long enough to forget it wasn’t the face beneath. I had brought all of them, a fractured council of selves, to learn under a man who had no interest in fixing anyone, only in witnessing.
Two and a half years later, I can say that truth won. Eventually. It wasn’t swift. It came in waves, silences, and uncomfortable moments of confrontation with my carefully curated image. You spend a lifetime armouring up and then find that the most painful part is learning to take it off without falling apart.
Trauma Has a Good Memory.
Dr Gabor Mate’s trauma-informed approach doesn’t deal in performance. He deals in presence. He doesn’t diagnose; he observes. And when he reflects you back to yourself, it’s disarming in the way only profound honesty can be.
Trauma, he says, is not what happens to you but what happens inside you as a result. That distinction changed everything. It moved the centre of gravity from the event to the self. Suddenly, the focus was not on the explosions in my past, literally and figuratively, but on the silence that followed them.
My childhood was frightening, lonely, disconnected, and mute in all the wrong places. Gabor helped me hear what was never said. He taught me that children don’t get traumatised because things happen, but because those things happen without comfort, without context, without someone to help them make sense of it.
The silence was the trauma. And silence, I discovered, has an impeccable memory.
From the Submarine to the Therapy Room:
Military life taught me discipline, strategy, and emotional containment. There is a clarity in following orders, especially when your world is wrapped in steel and sunk beneath the ocean. But therapy isn’t war. Clients don’t need a commander. They need an empathetic witness, a co-navigator. That realisation was like learning to use a different nervous system.
Training with Gabor challenged me to drop the facade of the knowing therapist. I resented it at first. I had trained hard and earned my titles. But Gabor would repeatedly, gently, then not-so-gently remind me that credentials don’t make you safe. Presence does.
His teachings became my compass. “There is no healing without authenticity,” he said. I wrote it down. Underlined it. Fought it. Avoided it. And finally, slowly, began to live it.
Authenticity is expensive. It demands you risk the loss of approval. It unsettles the carefully balanced image you offer the world. But it is the only path that doesn’t lead you in circles.
Psychedelics as Portal, Not a Panacea:
In my work with psychedelic preparation, integration and plant medicines, I have sat with countless people meeting the raw, unfiltered parts of themselves. I have seen tears give way to laughter, seen walls crumble in the soft light of sacred space. And still, Gabor’s voice would follow me there: the medicine is not the only healer here. You both are, work together.
Without integration, the visions are just cinema. The real ceremony begins the morning after, in the conversations with your child, partner, and clients. Healing, Gabor says, is not a state. It’s a relationship with the self, with others, with truth.
I am not a shaman. How could I be? Shamans are not self-appointed. They are chosen by their tribes, trained over decades, and shaped by lineage. My role is humbler. I hold space. I listen. I honour the process. That humility, too, came from Gabor’s teachings, his reverence for the sacred, tempered always by scepticism of ego.
The Family That Shapes the Self:
Gabor’s lens is always relational. It is never just about the individual. It is about the system they grew within, the scripts they inherited, the roles they absorbed. His questions are simple, but never easy: Who did you have to become to be loved? Whose pain are you still carrying? What happened to you?
My family shaped me like water shapes rock. Slowly, silently, relentlessly. The need to prove, achieve, and protect wasn’t ambition. It was a strategy. A way to be seen, to be heard.
Working with Gabor helped me see my clients not as collections of symptoms but as people playing out ancient family dramas. It helped me soften towards my parents, not in naive forgiveness but deep understanding. They, too, were shaped. They, too, carried things they never chose.
Becoming a Better Father, Husband, and Human:
It would be dishonest to say Gabor’s influence only changed my work. It changed everything.
As a father, I began listening more than correcting. I caught myself in moments where I once would have shamed, and instead asked: What does she need right now that she doesn’t know how to ask for?
As a husband, I stopped trying to win arguments and started trying to understand the pain behind the words. It was inconvenient, slow, but it worked.
As a friend, a mentor, a colleague, I began valuing truth over harmony, not as an excuse to be blunt, but as an invitation to be real. And in that realness, relationships deepened.
Dr Mate teaches that human connection is the most powerful medicine. Not the connection of shared hobbies or witty banter, but the connection that comes from being seen without masks. That kind of connection rewires the nervous system. It re-teaches the body that the world can be safe.
The Therapist Must First Be the Patient:
If I’ve learned anything in these years, it’s this: you can’t take someone somewhere you haven’t been. You must first make peace with your own bullshit and learn to sit with others in their grief, confusion, and rage. You don’t need to be perfect. You need to be honest.
Training with Gabor stripped away the professional persona. He wasn’t impressed by my CV. He was interested in the parts of me that still hurt, flinched, and longed. And through that process, I saw my work not as a performance but as a practice. A spiritual discipline of showing up, again and again, with presence.
The Irony of Becoming Whole:
Healing is not a crescendo. It is a spiral staircase with no top floor. You revisit the same themes and wounds, but from different angles, with a little more compassion each time.
The great irony is that we start this journey trying to become someone new, only to discover the goal is to return. To remember. To reclaim the parts of ourselves that were hidden for safety. We are not broken. We were buried.
Gabor’s work taught me that. And not through theory, but through relentless invitation to be real. To feel. To risk.
Conclusion: Truth as Ceremony:
If there is one thing I carry forward from these two and a half years with Dr Gabor Mate, it is that healing is not a moment. It is a ceremony. Sometimes sacred, sometimes silent, often wildly inconvenient.
Truth, when offered without aggression, is a form of love. It softens what shame has hardened. It makes the unspeakable sayable. And in that act, it transforms.
Paul Sinclair
Paul, Managing Director at Mind Matters, specialises in mental health, trauma, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. He has trained under Dr. Gabor Maté, a renowned expert in trauma and addiction, and has also undergone extensive training in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Paul's diverse background as an elite military unit member, top athlete, and successful entrepreneur informs his unique approach to transforming ingrained patterns of thought and behaviour. He has trained thousands of individuals, and over 20,000 development and mental health professionals follow his teachings on LinkedIn. Paul believes in the power of resilience and personal transformation, drawing from his journey to inspire and guide his clients.
