The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates. - Gabor Maté

If you come to me and say, ‘I’ve got an addiction to… whatever,’ I could say three things to you. One is that you have a genetic disease, which is the mantra in most of the medical world. Or I could tell you, ‘You are an idiot, you made a bad choice, you are morally degenerate, you are lacking will power,’ or I could say, ‘Hmm, what is that addiction doing for you? Oh, it’s soothing your pain, is it? So how did you develop that pain? What happened to you? And how can we help you heal that pain and handle it in ways that are not self-destructive?’ So, the role of the therapist is in helping people understand that what happened to them has a role in what happens inside them, so they don’t see themselves as deficit, bad or stupid, or as diseased; they see that how they are functioning is actually a fairly reasonable and understandable response to what happened to them.

The other mind entity is what we call the impartial observer. This mind of present-moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. It works through the brain but is not limited to the brain. It may be dormant in many of us, but it is never completely absent. It transcends the automatic functioning of past-conditioned brain circuits. ‘In the end,...I conclude that there is no good evidence… that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does.”
Knowing oneself comes from attending with compassionate curiosity to what is happening within.
Methods for gaining self-knowledge and self-mastery through conscious awareness strengthen the mind’s capacity to act as its own impartial observer. Among the simplest and most skilful of the meditative techniques taught in many spiritual traditions is the disciplined practice of what Buddhists call ‘bare attention’. Nietzsche called Buddha ‘that profound physiologist’ and his teachings less a religion than a ‘kind of hygiene’...’ Many of our automatic brain processes have to do with either wanting something or not wanting something else – very much the way a small child’s mental life functions. We are forever desiring or longing, or judging and rejecting. Mental hygiene consists of noticing the ebb and flow of all those automatic grasping or rejecting impulses without being hooked by then. Bare attention is directed not only toward what’s happening on the outside, but also to what’s taking place on the inside.
‘Be at least interested in your reactions as in the person or situation that triggers them.’... In a mindful state one can choose to be aware of the ebb and flow of emotions and thought patterns instead of brooding on their content. Not ‘he did this to me therefore I’m suffering’ but ‘I notice that feelings of resentment and a desire for vengeance keep flooding my mind.’... ‘Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us

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.