In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

As we’ve already seen, painful early experiences program both the neurophysiology of addiction and the distressing psychological states that addiction promises to relieve. Yet human beings who are able to direct conscious attention toward their mental processes discover something surprising: it’s not what happened in the past that creates our present misery but the way we have allowed past events to define how we see and experience ourselves in the present. A person can survive being beaten but cannot remain psychologically intact if he convinces himself that he was beaten because he is by nature blameworthy or because the world by its very nature is cruel. A child can overcome sexual violation, but she will be debilitated if she thinks that she somehow either deserved the abuse or brought it upon herself. She also cannot function as a self-respecting adult if she comes to believe that she is loveable or acceptable only for her sexuality. A neglected child may be helpless, but the damage comes if he acquires the defining belief that helplessness is his real and permanent state in the world. 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. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretatio...