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by
Gabor Maté
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February 11 - November 14, 2021
The mind and brain processes are the same in all addictions, no matter what form, as is the psycho-spiritual emptiness that resides at the core.
“You have 2,672 friends and an average of thirty likes per post and no one to have dinner with on a Saturday.”
“People who feel good about themselves don’t do things that endanger their bodies…. Traumatized people feel agitated, restless, tight in the chest. You hate the way you feel. You take drugs in order to stabilize your body.”
“I’m not going to ask you what you were addicted to,” I often say to people. “Nor when, nor for how long. Only, whatever your addictive focus; what did it offer you? What did you like about it? What, in the short term, did it give you that you craved or liked so much?” And universally, the answers are: “It helped me escape emotional pain; helped me deal with stress; gave me peace of mind, a sense of connection with others, a sense of control.”
The first question is not “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?”
“Only chronically and severely dislocated people are vulnerable to addiction.” By dislocation he means “an enduring lack of psychosocial integration.”
“How I frame it is the decriminalization of people who use drugs, not the decriminalization of the drugs,” says Dr. Henry.
One cannot make war on inanimate objects, only on human beings.
our civilized times we are punishing and tormenting people for having suffered trauma.
It is only the habit of our egocentric mind that divides the world into “us and them.” More precisely, it is our inability—or refusal—to see the us in “them” and the them in what we take to be “us.” Such failure of imagination is seen in every realm, from personal relationships to international politics. Simply put, it reflects that clinging to identity which is our way of belonging to a group. And if we identify with a group of any dimension narrower than all humanity, there must then be others who, by definition, do not belong and to whom, we may believe at least unconsciously, we are
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There is only one universal addiction process. Its manifestations are multiple, from the gentler to the life-threatening, but in all addictions it utilizes the same brain circuits of pain relief, reward and motivation; it imposes the same psychological dynamics of shame and denial, the same behaviours of subterfuge and dishonesty. In all cases, it exacts the price of inner peace, harm to relationships, and diminished self-worth.
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.
the discoveries of science, the teachings of the heart and the revelations of the soul all assure us that no human being is ever beyond redemption. The possibility of renewal exists so long as life exists. How to support that possibility in others and in ourselves is the ultimate question.
“streets of displacement and the buildings of exclusion.”
We may (and do) hope that people can be liberated from the demons that haunt them and work to encourage them in that direction, but we don’t fantasize that such psychological exorcism can be forced on anyone.
A long-time resident came up to the microphone. He said he didn’t have a poem to recite or anything else creative…. What he shared was that the Portland was his first home. That this is the only home he’s ever had and how grateful he was for the community he was part of. And how proud he was to be part of it, and he wished his mom and dad could see him now.”
“The reason I do drugs is so I don’t feel the fucking feelings I feel when I don’t do drugs,” Nick, a forty-year-old heroin and crystal meth addict once told me, weeping as he spoke.
The Hell Realm of painful emotions frightens most of us; drug addicts fear they would be trapped there forever but for their substances. This urge to escape exacts a fearful price.
My baby was dead.” Her grief is oceanic, her sense of guilt fathomless.
“When I get on the bus in this outfit, people just know. They move away from me. Some stare; most don’t even look in my direction. You know what that feels like? Like I’m an alien. I don’t feel right till I’m back here; no wonder nobody ever leaves.”
in fact, I had very little to give—I could not rescue people from their pain and sadness. All I could offer was to walk beside them as a fellow human being, a kindred spirit.
Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body. NAGUIB MAHFOUZ Palace of Desire
“I’m not afraid of dying,” a client told me. “Sometimes I’m more afraid of living.”
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.
Infant animals separated from their mothers can be soothed readily by low doses of narcotics, just as if it was actual physical pain they were enduring.fn1 2 The pain pathways in humans are no different.
The question is never “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?”
takes a greater effort of emotional imagination to empathize with the addict. We readily feel for a suffering child, but cannot see the child in the adult who, his soul fragmented and isolated, hustles for survival a few blocks away from where we shop or work.
Boredom, rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.
The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; “if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”
When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness
Do you even want that regular life?” “No, not really,” Jake says quietly and sadly. I don’t believe that’s true. I think deep in his heart there must live a desire for a life of wholeness and integrity that may be too painful to acknowledge—painful because, in his eyes, it’s unattainable. Jake is so identified with his addiction that he doesn’t dare imagine himself sober.
I’m not always stuck in that blind mode. I move in and out of it, depending on how I am doing in my own life. I’m more subject to deadening judgments and definitions that restrict my view of the other when I’m tired or stressed and most especially when, in some way, I’m not conducting myself with integrity. At such times my addict clients experience the power imbalance between us most acutely.
Almost uniformly, the greatest anguish confessed by my patients, male or female, concerns not the abuse they suffered but their own abandonment of their children. They can never forgive themselves for it. The very mention of it draws out bitter tears, and much of their continued drug use is intended to dull the impact of such memories.
Pain begets pain. Let those who would judge either of these women look to themselves.
“What happened to you is truly horrible. There is no other word for it and there is nothing I can say that comes even close to acknowledging just how terrible, how unfair it is for any being, any child to be forced to endure all that. But no matter what, I still don’t accept that things are hopeless for any human being. I believe there is a natural strength and innate perfection in everyone. Even though it’s covered up by all kinds of terrors and all kinds of scars, it’s there.”
You can never see and hear it all because, for all their sordid similarities, each story in the Downtown Eastside unfolded in the particular existence of a unique human being. Each one needs to be heard, witnessed and acknowledged anew, every time it’s told. And I’m especially humbled because I dared to imagine that Serena was less than the complex and luminous person she is. Who am I to judge her for being driven to the belief that only through drugs will she find respite from her torments?
Spiritual teachings of all traditions enjoin us to see the divine in each other. “Namaste,” the Sanskrit holy greeting, means: “The divine in me salutes the divine in you.”
sangfroid
Ralph is showcasing the terrible unrest of his soul. The suffering Germans and rapacious Jews in his narrative are projections of his own phantoms. The erratic mishmash he calls history reflects his inner chaos, confusion and fear.
All things transitory Are but a parable, Earth’s insufficiency Here finds fulfillment. The ineffable Wins life through love. The eternal feminine Leads us above.
As I read the great German’s poet’s verses in my comfortable home in an upscale, leafy Vancouver neighbourhood, I can’t help thinking that at this very same moment Ralph, supported by his cane, is holding vigil somewhere in the dusky and dirty Hastings Street evening, hustling for his next hit of cocaine. And in his heart he wants beauty no less than I, and no less than I, needs love.
Primo Levi, the insightful and infinitely compassionate chronicler of Auschwitz, called moments of reprieve those unexpected times when a person’s “compressed identity” emerges and asserts its uniqueness even amid the torments of a man-made inferno.
when they permit even a slight opening in the hard, prickly shells they’ve built to protect themselves. For that to happen, they must first sense our commitment to accepting them for who they are. That is the essence of harm reduction, but it’s also the essence of any healing or nurturing relationship.
book On Becoming a Person, the great American psychologist Carl Rogers described a warm, caring attitude, which he called unconditional positive regard because, he said, “it has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “[that] is not possessive, [that] demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere [that] simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so.”1
I try to take my own value system out of it and look at the value something has for them.
circumlocution.
He launches into tirades on any topic, not recalling what he already said or where he was intending to go. He meanders, becoming snagged on the brambles of one thought, getting lost in the bushes of the next. He doesn’t know how to stop the flow of words.
Dean knows that isolation is in the very nature of addiction. Psychological isolation tips people into addiction in the first place, and addiction keeps them isolated because it sets a higher value on their motivations and behaviours around the drug than on anything else
The meaning of all addictions could be defined as endeavours at controlling our life experiences with the help of external remedies…. 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. THOMAS HORA, M.D. Beyond the Dream: Awakening to Reality
