In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

Compulsive shoppers experience the same mental and emotional processes when engaged in their addiction. The thinking parts of the brain go on furlough. In a brain imaging study conducted at the University of Munster, Germany, scientists found “reduced activation in brain areas associated with working memory and reasoning and, on the other hand, increased activation in areas involved in processing of emotions,” when even ordinary consumers were engaged in choosing between different brand names of a given product.16 Under logo capitalism, it turns out, the vaunted “market forces” are largely unconscious—a feature of addiction that advertising agencies well understand. In previous work the electrical discharges of the brain circuits governing pleasure were also found to be in overdrive during shopping, in contrast to the rationality circuits. Neurologist Michael Deppe, the lead researcher, said that “the more expensive the product, the crazier the shoppers get. And when buying really expensive products, the part of the brain dealing with rational thought has reduced its activity to almost zero…. The stimulation of emotional centres shows that shopping is a stress relief.”17

I’ve even had several of my addictions up and running at the same time. That is, the addiction process was active and looking for more and more external trophies to capture. For all that, the anxiety, ennui and fear of the void driving the whole operation rarely abated.

Withdrawal consists of irritability, a generally glum mood, restlessness and a sense of aimlessness. No doubt it has its chemical components: I’m experiencing the effect of diminished dopamine and endorphin levels. Other nonsubstance addicts experience similar symptoms after abruptly stopping whatever behaviour they were binging with. The journey from addictive self-indulgence to depression is rapid and inexorable.

Needing extremes, the addict leaps from one behaviour to another.

and with books, many unread.

obsessive striving for recognition and driven work habits

Lack of differentiation and impaired self-regulation reflect a lack of emotional maturity. Psychological maturation is the development of a sense of self as separate from inner experience—a capacity entirely absent in the young child. The child has to learn that she is not identical with whatever feeling happens to be dominant in her at any particular moment.

These, then, are the traits that most often underlie the addiction process: poor self-regulation; lack of basic differentiation; lack of a healthy sense of self; a sense of deficient emptiness; and impaired impulse control. The development of these traits is not mysterious—or, more correctly, there is no mystery about the circumstances under which the positive qualities of self-regulation, self-worth, differentiation and impulse control fail to develop. Any gardener knows that if a plant hasn’t grown, most likely the conditions were lacking. The same goes for children. The addictive personality is a personality that hasn’t matured. When we come to address healing, a key question will be how to promote maturity in ourselves or in others whose early environment sabotaged healthy emotional growth.

“It has a lot to do with which experience brings relief from whatever pains us,” he said. “For a lot of people something like compact discs would not be high on the list, but my guess is that music means something deep for you, that for you it’s a profound emotional experience.”

“First, you may have a genetic sensitivity toward music,” Dr. Goodman suggested, “and you may have been affected by the kind of music your parents listened to. But there could have been earlier influences—for example, whether in infancy you were often left in a room where you weren’t cuddled but you were able to hear, so your auditory system became an important conduit of emotional connection with the world.”

My relatives were caring people who looked after me as best they could, but I have to imagine that to a year-old infant, they were complete strangers. The small child’s natural response to overwhelming emotional loss is a defensive shut-down. I’ve had a lifelong resistance to receiving love—not to being loved or even to knowing intellectually that I am loved, but to accepting love vulnerably and openly on a visceral, emotional level. People who cannot find or receive love need to find substitutes—and that’s where addictions come in.

Except in rare cases of physical disease, the more obese a person is, the more emotionally starved they have been at some crucial period in their life.

Invariably, people who eat too much have not only suffered emotional loss in the past, but are also psychically deprived or highly stressed in the present. A woman might leave an unsatisfactory relationship, shed weight and gain confidence, only to become heavy again after going back to her partner. Emotional energy expended without perceived reward is compensated for by calories ingested. Similarly, many people who quit smoking begin to overeat because their craving for oral soothing is no longer eased by their cigarette and the loss of their stress reliever, nicotine, leaves them dopamine-deprived.

The roots of sex addiction also reach back to childhood experience. Sex addiction authority Dr. Aviel Goodman points out that the vast majority of female sex addicts were sexually abused as children, as were up to 40 per cent of the men.1 “Human beings are very adaptable,” Dr. Goodman comments. Being held and cuddled is so important to us that we’ll associate love with whatever gives us that warmth and contact. If a person feels wanted only sexually, as an adult she may look to sex to reaffirm that she is loveable and wanted. Sex addicts who were not abused as children may have had more subtle forms of sexualization projected on them by a parent or they may have felt so unloved or undesirable that they now look to sexual contact as a quick source of comfort.

At the first hit of morphine the pre-adolescent Stephen was overawed by wonder as his brain flooded with opiates his own circuits could never produce. “What did that feel like?” I ask. “Like a warm, wet blanket,” he replies, “a place of safety—the safety that came before pain and danger, before the enormity of being born, pushed and dragged, kicking and screaming into this world.” The sex trade worker who told me that her first hit of heroin was like a warm, soft hug was fantasizing a state of infant joy. Stephen’s “warm, wet blanket” harkens back even further, to the womb—perhaps the last time he’d had a sense of security.

While it’s true that overt episodes of hostility between the parents may damage the child, so may repressed anger and unhappiness. As a rule, whatever we don’t deal with in our lives, we pass on to our children. Our unfinished emotional business becomes theirs. As a therapist said to me, “Children swim in their parents’ unconscious like fish swim in the sea.” This mother and father were fully committed to their family and still are, but under such circumstances all the parental love in the world could not provide the children with a well-attuned, nonstressed, nurturing environment.

Loyalty, integrity and honour lose meaning.

In his autobiography, the warmest acknowledgment the hyper-eloquent Black could conjure up was that she was a “convivial and altogether virtuous person … as affable as he [Black’s father] was prone to be aloof.” It was the reclusive, often-absent, depressive and heavy-drinking father that Conrad idolized.

That sneering word “little” may articulate precisely how Conrad feels about himself at the core of his psyche—our sneers always tell us who we feel we are. A powerful person’s self-esteem may appear to be high, but it’s a hollow shell if it’s based on externals, on the ability to impress or intimidate others. It’s what psychologist Gordon Neufeld calls conditional or contingent self-esteem: it depends on circumstances. The greater the void within, the more urgent the drive to be noticed and to be “important,” and the more compulsive the need for status. By contrast, genuine self-esteem needs nothing from the outside. It doesn’t say, “I’m worthwhile because I’ve done this, that or the other.” It says, “I’m worthwhile whether or not I’ve done this, that or the other. I don’t need to be right or to wield power, to amass wealth or achievements.”

“Power is like a drug,” wrote Primo Levi. The need for either is unknown to anyone who has not tried them, but after the initiation … the dependency and need for ever larger doses is born, as are the denial of reality and the return to childish dreams of omnipotence … The syndrome produced by protracted and undisputed power is clearly visible: a distorted view of the world, dogmatic arrogance, the need for adulation, convulsive clinging to the levers of command, and contempt for the law.

Addiction is always a poor substitute for love.

When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it’s because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don’t want to acknowledge. I’m speaking here not of my critique of another person’s behaviour in objective terms but of the self-righteous tone of personal judgment that colours my opinion. If, for example, I resent some person close to me as “controlling,” it may be owing to my own inability to assert myself.

Moral judgments, however, are never about the obvious; they always speak to the underlying similarities between the judge and the condemned. My judgments of others are an accurate gauge of how, beneath the surface, I feel about myself.

Addiction cuts large swaths across our culture. Many of us are burdened with compulsive behaviours that harm us and others, behaviours whose toxicity we fail to acknowledge or feel powerless to stop. Many people are addicted to accumulating wealth; for others the compulsive pull is power. Men and women become addicted to consumerism, status, shopping or fetishized relationships, not to mention the obvious and widespread addictions such as gambling, sex, junk food and the cult of the “young” body image.

We’ve already defined addiction as any relapsing behaviour that satisfies a short-term craving and persists despite its long-term negative consequences. The long-term ill effects of our society’s addiction, if not to oil then to the amenities and luxuries that oil makes possible, are obvious. They range from environmental destruction, climate change and the toxic effects of pollution on human health to the many wars that the need for oil, or the attachment to oil wealth, has triggered.

We see that substance addictions are only one specific form of blind attachment to harmful ways of being. Yet we condemn the addict’s stubborn refusal to give up something deleterious to his life or to the lives of others. Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations?

We despise, ostracize and punish the addict because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him.

At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only towards the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future—the two elements that make the present intolerable.

In the rush to emulate the Western world’s achievements, many countries are neglecting to learn from the disruptions, dysfunctions and diseases Western social models engender.fn1

Within living memory Native children were seized from their homes, alienated from their families and, for all intents and purposes, incarcerated in “civilizing” institutions where their lot was one of cultural suppression, emotional and physical maltreatment and, with distressing frequency, sexual abuse. It would be heartening to be able to say that our society has acknowledged its enormous historical, moral and economic debt to its Native citizens. Although that has occurred sporadically, the overall pattern continues to be economic dispossession, denial of historical rights and patronizing control.

It is commonly thought that peer affiliation leads to drug use because kids set bad examples for each other. That’s part of the picture, but a deeper reason is that under ordinary circumstances, adolescents who rely on their peers for emotional acceptance are more prone to being hurt, to experiencing the sting of each other’s immature and therefore often insensitive ways of relating. They are far more stressed than children who are well connected to nurturing adults.

Kids are not cruel by nature, but they are immature. They taunt, tease and reject. Those who have lost their orientation to adults and look to the peer group instead find themselves having to shut down emotionally for sheer protection. As we have seen with children abused at home, emotional shutting down—what in a bookfn2 I co-wrote with Dr. Gordon Neufeld we call “the dangerous flight from feeling”—greatly increases the motivation to use drugs.

The drug addict is today’s scapegoat. Viewed honestly, much of our culture is geared towards enticing us away from ourselves, into externally directed activity, into diverting the mind from ennui and distress. The hardcore addict surrenders her pretence about that. Her life is all about escape. The rest of us can, with varying success, maintain our charade, but to do so, we banish her to the margins of society.

For the judgments you give will be the judgments you will get, and the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given. Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own? How dare you say to your brother, “Let me take the splinter out of your eye,” when all the time there is a plank in your own? Take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.

The lives of abused children do not end when they are rescued—if they are rescued, as most never are. Many become teenagers with spirits not mended and reach adulthood with eyes still dead.

Some of these former children are not pleasant to deal with. Scruffy and dirty, shifty and manipulative, they invite distaste. Fearful and contemptuous of authority at the same time, they evoke hostility. The police often handle them roughly. Cops are not necessarily predisposed to harshness, but a loss of humane interaction inevitably results whenever an entire group of people is de-legitimized while another group is granted virtually unrestrained physical authority over them.

Such experiences, for the addict, add more links to the chain of utter powerlessness that began in childhood.

This man with severe ADHD and learning disabilities, post-traumatic stress disorder and deeply entrenched drug addiction; with no employment skills; with no history of successful human relationships—this is one of the culprits the police devote their time, skills and energy to investigating and arresting; about whose misdeeds prosecutors versed in the law gather evidence; whom socially conscious and poorly recompensed Legal Aid defenders assist; and whom learned judges admonish and repeatedly incarcerate. Such is the War on Drugs.

Norm Stamper, former police chief of Seattle, who after his retirement, has become an advocate of decriminalizing drugs. Chief Stamper writes: Think of this war’s real casualties: tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Americans incarcerated, many for 20 years, some for life; families ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders shot dead on city streets … The United States has, through its war on drugs, fostered political instability, official corruption, and health and environmental disasters around the globe.fn1 In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international “War on Drugs” is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation.2

According to Dr. George Povey, Professor of Health Care and Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia, in 1995 illegal drugs caused 805 Canadian deaths, alcohol 6,507 and tobacco 34,728. “So who’s for a War on Tobacco?” he asks.6

A major study conducted on behalf of the British government in 2005 illustrated both the rich benefits that current drug legislation confers on major traffickers and the ludicrous impotence of law enforcement efforts against the drug trade. “The profit margins for major traffickers of heroin into Britain are so high they outstrip luxury goods companies such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci,” reported the Guardian. “The traffickers enjoy such high profits that seizure rates of 60–80% are needed to have any serious impact on the flow of drugs into Britain but nothing greater than 20% has been achieved.” Downing Street allowed only half the study’s findings to be published, prompting an opposition spokesperson to argue, with reason, that “what this report shows and what the government is too paranoid to admit is that the ‘war on drugs’ is a disaster. We need an evidence-led debate about the way forward but if they withhold the evidence we can’t have the debate.”7

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jul/05/drugsandalcohol.freedomofinformation

“The major reason why our society is awash in illicit drugs is the unbelievable profits that can be realized in their being manufactured and sold,” writes Judge James P. Grey of the California Superior Court.8 It is the same in Canada. Dr. Povey points out that “the billion Canadian bucks we throw at drug control each year have trivial effect upon supply but powerfully inflate market value. A kilo of heroin that costs $3,000 in Pakistan sells for $150,000 on our streets, which explains why a serious drug user needs $50,000 spare change yearly to stay cool.”

Drugs do not make the addict into a criminal; the law does.

As Judge Grey documents in his persuasive critique, sub-titled A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, most of the social harm related to drugs does not come from the effects of the substances themselves but from legal prohibitions against their use.

In Washington State the King County Bar Association has acknowledged the devastation caused by prevailing drug policies. In 2001 it adopted a comprehensive statement asserting that the War on Drugs is “fundamentally flawed and is associated with numerous negative societal consequences.” Their summary of the War’s disastrous effects reflects the consensus view of virtually all those, in North America and elsewhere, who have studied the question without ideological blinkers: the failure to reduce problematic drug use, particularly among children; dramatic increases in crime related to prohibited drugs, including economic crimes related to addiction and the fostering of efficient and violent criminal enterprises that have occupied the unregulated and immensely profitable commercial market made possible by drug prohibition; skyrocketing public costs arising from both increased drug abuse and increased crime; erosion of public health from the spread of disease, from the concealment and inadequate treatment of addiction and from undue restrictions on proper medical treatment of pain; the abridgement of civil rights through summary forfeitures of property, invasions of privacy and violations of due process; disproportionately adverse effects of drug law enforcement on the poor and persons of color; and the clogging of the courts and compromises in the effective administration of justice, as well as a loss of respect for the law.

“Effective Drug Control: A New Legal Framework for State Regulation and Control of Psychoactive Substances as a Workable Alternative to the “War on Drugs”; https://www.kcba.org/kcba/druglaw/pdf/EffectiveDrugControl.pdf. Maté, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (p. 444). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

A CORE ASSUMPTION in the War on Drugs is that the addict is free to make the choice not to be addicted and that harsh social or legal measures will deter him from pursuing his habit.

Almost any human being, when overwhelmed by stress or powerful emotions, will act or react not from intention but from mechanisms that are set off deep in the brain, rather than being generated in the conscious and volitional segments of the cortex. When acting from a driven or triggered state, we are not free.

“When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of understanding what the brain is doing and the relationship between conscious experience and the brain,” Dr. Schwartz said, “the data does not support the commonly held principle that you can just will yourself into one mental state or another.

The distinction between automatic mechanism and conscious free will may be illustrated by the difference between punching a wall with your fist in a fit of reactive rage and mindfully saying to yourself, “I have so much anger in me, I really want to punch this wall right now”—or even more consciously, “My mind tells me I should punch the wall.” The latter mind-states give you the option of not striking the wall, without which there is no choice and no freedom—just a fractured hand and a head full of regret. “Choice implies consciousness,” Eckhart Tolle points out, “—a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.”3

Both the obsessive-compulsive and the addict experience overwhelming tension until they succumb to their compulsive drive. When they finally do, they gain an immense, if momentary, sense of relief. Given this absence of psychic freedom, the addict might as well be an obsessive-compulsive—with one essential difference. Unlike the addict, the person with OCD does not anticipate his compulsive activity with any pleasure. Far from craving it as the addict does, she regards it as unpleasant and distressing.