Gabor Maté Quotes

The question is never “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” The research literature is unequivocal: most hard-core substance abusers come from abusive homes.

Affirmation When we affirm, we make a positive statement; we move toward something of value.

It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.

Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine. (p38)

The warmth and satisfaction of positive contact with the adult is often just as good as a psychostimulant in supplying the child’s prefrontal cortex with dopamine.

We think that children act, whereas what they mostly do is react. Parents who realize this acquire a powerful tool. By noticing their own responses to the child, rather than fixating on the child’s responses to them, they free up tremendous energy for growth.

Parenting, in short, is a dance of the generations. Whatever affected one generation but has not been fully resolved will be passed on to the next. (p216)

The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.

Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the person or situation that triggers them,” Eckhart Tolle advises.

Whereas individual people can become dislocated by misfortunes in any society, only a free-market society produces mass dislocation as part of its normal functioning, even during periods of prosperity. (p288)

Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anesthetics. Heroin and cocaine, both powerful physical painkillers, also ease psychological discomfort.

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden — but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.

Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs our ability to see reality.

Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is when we are not seen and known.

Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person’s unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.