BBC Radio 4 – Young Again

Gabor was born in 1943, in Nazi-occupied Hungary. His Jewish mother, whose parents died in Auschwitz, gave Gabor up when he was a child. “I’m 11 months old, and to save my life, literally to save my life, he hands me on the streets to a complete stranger, a Christian woman, and says, ‘Please take this baby.’ .. to relatives who are hiding me, because I can’t keep him alive’”.

He says the trauma, felt at such a young age, is remembered by the body. “I (as a baby) experience that the world is a dangerous place. This is downloaded into my nervous system… So I grow up with this unconscious sense of fear of abandonment and having to prove the worth of my existence. I can’t be valuable on my own, otherwise (my mother) wouldn’t have given it to me.”

3. He doesn’t believe in guilt

When asked what her mother could have done differently, Gabor says, “She couldn’t have done anything else.” He chooses not to blame people for unintentionally causing trauma. “Parents, for the most part, try to do their best,” he says. “And if they don’t do their best, or even if they hurt their children, it’s only because they have unresolved trauma from their own childhood.”

He admits that he negatively affected his own children, when he was less well understood. “I passed on certain aspects of my trauma to my children,” she says. “I didn’t want to do it. I did my best. I loved them, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” He put in long hours as a doctor, to feel important and necessary, to the detriment of his children. “If you feel like you’re not wanted, the best advice I can give you is: go to medical school. They’re going to want you all the time… The impact (of this) on my kids is that dad’s never there.”