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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gabor Maté
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February 11 - November 14, 2021
Human beings have an ingrained opposition to any sense of being forced, an automatic resistance to coercion that my friend Dr. Gordon Neufeld has called counterwill. It is triggered whenever a person feels controlled or pressured to do someone else’s bidding—and we can generate counterwill even against pressure that we put on ourselves.
For me personally, sobriety means being free of internal compulsion and living according to principles I believe in. Unlike abstinence, I don’t experience it as a constraint but as liberation. I don’t say I’m fully sober. I do say I recognize and value conscious awareness—another term for sobriety.
Sweet are the rewards of sobriety.
My advice to anyone with addictive behaviours is to begin telling the truth. If you are not ready to drop the behaviour, then choose it openly.
At the very least, 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.
anyone who has successfully achieved sobriety knows that no evanescent pleasure can be compared with the peace that comes from living in integrity. Many people think of commitment as a limitation of possibilities. Rather than a limitation, it is a source of joy. When you are true to your word, you are in charge. Governing your life are your values and your intentions, not some mechanical compulsion arising from the past. That emancipation means much more than the illusory freedom of obeying any impulse that arises in the moment.
inventory is a review of past karma. To pretend that our existence doesn’t affect others is to deny karma, to deny that every action has a reaction, to pretend that cause and effect aren’t constantly in play. This careful parsing of our past forces us to become more cognizant of karma. When we see how our actions hurt others—and ourselves—we become more careful about what we are doing in the present. When we see our destructive patterns of thought, speech, and behavior, we begin to change, to unravel these habits, to act in ways that won’t require more inventory writing.
through examining my conscience daily, even multiple times a day—a kind of naming the assets and the deficits—I could keep my guilt level really low. And that if one had self-acceptance and low guilt, it would be easier to stay away from painkillers—in my case, alcohol.”
The most potent stressors are loss of control and uncertainty in important areas of life, whether personal or professional, economic or psychological.
Stresses like emotional isolation or the sense that we are dominated by others change our brains in ways that increase the need for external sources of dopamine—that is, they increase the risk of addiction.
key determining factor triggering the stress response is the way a person perceives a situation.
To see addiction as the only problem is to leave intact the context that triggered the addiction in the first place.
Purity and impurity belong to oneself. No one else can purify another. BUDDHA The Dhammapada
“When it comes to a choice between feeling guilt or resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If refusal to take on responsibility for another person’s behaviours burdens you with guilt, while consenting to it leaves you eaten by resentment, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide.
addict doesn’t engage in his habits out of a desire to betray or hurt anyone else but to escape his own distress. It’s a poor choice and an irresponsible one, but it is not directed at anyone else even if it does hurt others.
A BARRIER FOR many people when it comes to Twelve-Step work around addiction is Step Two, evoking a higher power: [We] came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. The resistance is natural if the Power is identified as the God by whom the child felt betrayed.
For many people, the higher power concept need not be concerned with a deity or anything expressly spiritual. It simply means rising above their self-regarding ego, committing to serve something greater than their own immediate desires.
the brain area that lights up as a person performs an altruistic act is not the circuitry activated by pleasure or by the anticipation of reward.
We have seen that addiction arises out of dislocation. The absence of meaning is yet another dislocation that we human beings, spiritual creatures that we are, cannot well endure.
“meaning arises only out of a dialogue with the world.”
Infants come into the world fully present and alive to every possibility, but they soon begin to shut down parts of themselves that their environment is unable to recognize or accept with love.
we develop behaviour patterns and emotional coping mechanisms to cover up the emptiness, mistakenly believing that the resulting traits represent our true “personality.” Indeed, what we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.
Therapy strives to make the deficient self stronger by uncovering the sources of a person’s emotional pain and releasing the rigid defensive patterns built up against it. Spiritual exploration ploughs the same ground but is less concerned with “fixing” or improving things than with rediscovering what is whole and has not been absent, just obscured. As Edmund Spenser wrote, “For there is nothing lost but may be found, if sought.”
The truth is within, which is why outward-directed attempts to fill in the void created when we lose touch with it cannot bring us closer to the serenity we long for.
We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.
Once a student’s eyes are open, instructors appear everywhere. Everything can teach us. Our most painful emotions point to our greatest possibilities, to where our authentic nature is hidden. People whom we judge are our mirrors. People who judge us call forth our courage to respect our own truth. Compassion for ourselves supports our compassion for others. As we open to the truth within, we hold safe a space of healing for others. They may do the same for us. Healing occurs in a sacred place located within us all: “When you know yourselves, then you will be known.”
“because parents share family environment as well as heredity with their offspring, parent-offspring resemblance does not prove the existence of genetic influence.”
A Yale University study has shown that among cocaine users with ADHD, those who are treated only for their addiction but not for their predisposing ADHD don’t do as well.
In this Yale study as many as 35 per cent of cocaine users who presented for treatment met the diagnostic criteria for childhood ADHD.1 In another study, as many as 40 per cent of adult alcoholics were found to have underlying attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder.2 People with ADHD are twice as likely as others to fall into substance abuse and nearly four times as likely as others to move from alcohol to other psychoactive drugs.3 People with ADHD are also more likely to smoke, to gamble and to have any number of other addictive behaviours. Among crystal meth addicts a significant
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The basic point is that ADHD and addictive tendencies both arise out of stressful early childhood experience. Although there is likely some genetic predisposition toward ADHD, a predisposition is far from the same as a predetermination.
Abused children are far more likely than others to be diagnosed with ADHD, and the same brain structures affected by childhood trauma are most consistently abnormal in scans of children with ADHD.
The personality traits of people with ADHD and addiction are often identical: poor self-regulation, deficient impulse control, poor differentiation and a constant need to find distractions from distressing internal states. These distractions can be internal, as in tuning out, or external, as in the need to be stimulated by activities, food, other people or substances. Thus people with ADHD are predisposed to self-medicate.
According to one study, 32 per cent of adolescents who began to use methamphetamine (crystal meth) between the ages of ten and fifteen did so for the drug’s calming effect.10 Even among rats, the most hyperactive are the ones most likely to self-administer stimulants.
Children who have been abused by adults or are for any other reason alienated from adults, do not look to grownups for advice, modelling or information.
Whether we see this man’s history as defeat or triumph is a matter of perspective. He has risen through depths of despair most of the society that ostracizes him cannot begin to fathom, and there is still spirit in him that wants to contribute, to create meaning and to affirm life. I don’t know if his future will see that spirit manifested in action, but its very existence is a miracle.
