In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

This step should really be called devalue. Its purpose is to help you drive into your own thick skull just what has been the real impact of the addictive urge in your life: disaster. You know this already, and that is why you are engaged in these four steps. It’s because of the negative impact that you’ve taken yourself by the scruff of the neck and delayed acting on the impulse while you’ve relabeled and reattributed it and while you have refocused on some healthier activity. In this revalue step you will remind yourself why you’ve gone to all this trouble. The more clearly you see how things are, the more liberated you will be. We know that the addicted brain assigns a falsely high value to the addictive object, substance, or behavior, the process called salience attribution. The addicted mind has been fooled into making the object of your addiction the highest priority. Addiction has moved in and taken over your attachment-reward and incentive-motivation circuits. Where love and vitality should be, addiction roosts. The distorted brain circuits, including the orbitofrontal cortex, are making you believe that experiences that can come authentically only from genuine intimacy, creativity, or honest endeavor will be yours for the taking through addiction. In the revalue step you devalue the false gold. You assign to it its proper worth: less than nothing. What has this addictive urge done for me? you will ask. It has caused me to spend money heedlessly or to stuff myself w...