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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gabor Maté
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December 11, 2024 - January 8, 2025
Parent-blaming is emotionally unkind and scientifically incorrect. All parents do their best; only our best is limited by our own unresolved or unconscious trauma.
Addictions arise from thwarted love, from our thwarted ability to love children the way they need to be loved, from our thwarted ability to love ourselves and one another in the ways we all need. Opening our hearts is the path to healing addiction—opening our compassion for the pain within ourselves, and the pain all around us.
“Used to bench press two hundred pounds, Doc,” Tony, emaciated, shrivelled and dying of AIDS, cracked during one of his last office visits. “Now I can’t even bench press my own dick.”
When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion.
Unfortunately, all external means of improving our life experiences are double-edged swords: they are always good and bad. No external remedy improves our condition without, at the same time, making it worse.
It’s hard to get enough of something that almost works.
“I want nothing and fear nothing,” said Zorba the Greek. “I’m free.” There are not many Zorbas amongst us.
“‘Just one more’ is the binding factor in the circle of suffering,” writes the Buddhist monk and teacher Sakyong Mipham.1
A secret addiction comes equipped with praise deflectors.
How quickly my heart hardens. And how brittle a hard heart can be.
“Forget about your life situation for a while and pay attention to your life,” writes the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. “Your life situation exists in time—your life is now.”
“My goal is only that each day I should become closer to the God that I understand.”
We human beings don’t like feeling responsible: as individuals for our own actions; as parents for our children’s hurts; or as a society for our many failings. Genetics—that neutral, impassive, impersonal handmaiden of Nature—would absolve us of responsibility and of its ominous shadow, guilt.
any repeated behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others.
My sense of worth, unavailable to me for who I am, has come from work. And in the practice of medicine I found the perfect venue to prove my usefulness and indispensability. For a long time it was impossible for me to turn down work—the drug of being wanted was far too powerful to refuse and, in any case, I needed the flame of constant preoccupation to ward off the anxiety or depression or ennui that always lurked at the edges of my psyche. Like any addict, I used my addictions to help regulate my moods, my internal experience. On weekends when the beeper fell silent I felt empty and
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We teach what we most need to learn—and sometimes give what we most need to receive.
As Dr. Bruce Perry said about drug addicts, “we need to be very loving, very accepting, and very patient with people who have these problems.” We also need to extend that same loving, accepting and patient attitude toward ourselves.
The acronym COAL has been proposed for this attitude of compassionate curiosity: curiosity, openness, acceptance and love: “Hmm. I wonder what drove me to do this again?”
My anxiety clothes itself in concerns about body image or financial security, doubts regarding loveability or the ability to love, self-disparagement and existential pessimism about life’s meaning and purpose—or, on the other hand, it manifests itself as grandiosity, the need to be admired, to be seen as special. At bottom it is nameless and formless. I feel sure it was forged in my chest cavity somewhere between my lungs and heart long before I knew the names of things.
Incompleteness is the baseline state of the addict. The addict believes—either with full awareness or unconsciously—that he is “not enough.”
The British psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote somewhere that there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds. Terrified of my mind, I had always dreaded to spend a moment alone with it.
“But I don’t feel any desperation,” some may say. “I just love whatever I’m doing so much that I never want to stop.” Workaholics are prone to think that way, and I used to.
“I fully acknowledge that my cravings and behaviours have been out of control and that my inability to regulate them has led to dysfunction and chaos in important areas of my life. I no longer deny their impact on myself or my coworkers or my loved ones, and I admit my failure to confront them honestly and consistently.”
On the contrary, it is in the nature of the ego to turn anything to its advantage. Even the public disclosure of my addictive patterns has served to reassure me of my sincerity and honesty and “courage.”
There is no moving forward without breaking through the wall of denial—or, in the case of such an obstinate and slippery mind as mine, breaking through several walls, whose existence I do not even want to acknowledge.
The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it.
do not compound your inner shame by lying. Better you should look “bad” in the eyes of others than to sink further in your own estimation of yourself.
When truly sober, we look back compassionately at our addicted selves and, like the human boy Pinocchio gazing at his wooden toy self slumped on a chair, we shake our heads and say: “How foolish I was when I was a puppet.”
“When it comes to a choice between feeling guilt or resentment, choose the guilt every time.”
The belief that anyone “should” be any different than he or she is is toxic to oneself, to the other and to the relationship.
22 per cent of ADHD symptoms in eight- and nine-year-old children can be directly linked to maternal anxiety during pregnancy.5
