Gabor Maté Quotes

It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.

Passion creates, addiction consumes.

The War on Drugs, from the Hastings-facing window of the PortlandHotel, is manifested in the pregnant Celia kneeling on the sidewalk,handcuffed wrists behind her back, eyes cast on the ground. Therewas no Detective-Sergeant Gillespie to protect her when, as a littlegirl, she was raped by her stepfather and subjected to the nocturnalspitting ritual, so in the War on Drugs she has become one of theenemy.

Addiction is pretty simple. It's what happens when peolme don't get what they need, and end up soothing themselves.

What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.

The distressing internal state is not examined: thefocus is entirely on the outside: What can Ireceive from the world thatwill make me feel okay, if only for a moment? Bare attention can showher that these moods and feelings have only the meaning and powerthat she gives them. Eventually she will realize that there is nothing torun away from. Situations might need to be changed, but there is nointernal hell that one must escape by dulling or stimulating the mind.

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.