Gabor Maté Quotes

The other way we can avoid the experience of anger is through repression. So repression and discharge are two sides of the same coin. Both represent fear and anxiety, and for that reason, both trigger physiological stress responses regardless of what we consciously feel or do not feel.

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

I used the f-word. I said, ‘Fuck your statistics.’” “Good for you,” I offered. “That probably helped extend your life.

The wondrous power of a drug is to offer the addict protection from pain while at the same time enabling her to engage the world with excitement and meaning. “It’s not that my senses are dulled — no, they open, expanded,” explained a young woman whose substances of choice are cocaine and marijuana. “But the anxiety is removed, and the nagging guilt and — yeah!” The drug restores to the addict the childhood vivacity she suppressed long ago.

Much of what we do arises from automatic programming that bypasses conscious awareness and may even run contrary to our intentions, as Dr. Schwartz points out:
The passive side of mental life, which is generated solely and completely by brain mechanisms, dominates the tone and tenor of our day-to-day, even our second-to-second experience. During the quotidian business of daily life, the brain does indeed operate very much as a machine does.
Decisions that we may believe to be freely made can arise from unconscious emotional drives or subliminal beliefs. They can be dictated by events of which we have no recollection. The stronger a person’s automatic brain mechanisms and the weaker the parts of the brain that can impose conscious control, the less true freedom that person will be able to exercise in her life. In OCD, and in many other conditions, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning the individual, the malfunctioning brain circuitry may override rational judgment and intention. 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.

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

Freedom in society is gauged by our success in getting what we want and conditioned by status and power, by race, class and gender. In the internal world of the psyche, however, freedom means something very different. It is the ability to opt for our long-term physical and spiritual well-being as opposed to our immediate urges. Absent that ability, any talk of ‘free will’ or ‘choice’ becomes nearly meaningless.

Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art or music, through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening or the art of social discourse. The point is to honour the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits.

Whenever we ascribe a motive to the other person, as in “you are doing this because...,” we discard curiosity and immobilize compassion.

But how to soothe souls inflamed by the intense torment imposed first by childhood experiences almost too sordid to believe and then, with mechanical repetition, by the sufferers themselves? And how to offer them comfort when their suffering is made worse every day by social ostracism — by what the scholar and writer Elliot Leyton has described as “the bland, racist, sexist, and ‘classist’ prejudices buried in Canadian society: an institutionalized contempt for the poor, for sex-trade workers, for drug addicts and alcoholics, for aboriginal people.

Spiritual work and psychological work are both necessary to reclaim our true nature. Without psychological strength, spiritual practice can easily become another addictive distraction from reality. Conversely, shorn of a spiritual perspective we are prone to stay stuck in the limited realm of the grasping ego, even if it’s a healthier and more balanced ego.

Judgment or blaming is not the point. Understanding is.

Time after time it was the “nice” people, the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness in my family practice, or who came under my care at the hospital palliative ward I directed.

But as we have seen, hard-core drug users do not wait to be “enabled,” and there are few harsh consequences they haven’t yet experienced. There is no evidence from anywhere in the world that harm-reduction measures encourage drug use. Denying addicts humane assistance multiplies their miseries without bringing them one inch closer to recovery.

"Is it possible nevertheless that our consumer culture does make good on its promises, or could do so? Might these, if fulfilled, lead to a more satisfying life? When I put the question to renowned psychologist Tim Krasser, professor emeritus of psychology at Knox College, his response was unequivocal. "Research consistently shows," he told me, "that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse also tend to be higher among people who value the aims encouraged by consumer society."

He points to four central principles of what he calls ACC — American corporate capitalism: it "fosters and encourages a set of values based on self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition."

There is a seesaw oscillation, Tim found, between materialistic concerns on the one hand and prosocial values like empathy, generosity, and cooperation on the other: the more the former are elevated, the lower the latter descend. For example, when people strongly endorse money, image, and status as prime concerns, they are less likely to engage in ecologically beneficial activities and the emptier and more insecure they will experience themselves to be. They will have also lower-quality interpersonal relationships. In turn, the more insecure people feel, the more they focus on material things.

As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates.

Disconnection in all its guises — alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation — is becoming our culture's most plentiful product. No wonder we