GABOR MATÉ
Addiction — I Know it Well
Is it a disease or an adaptive behavior?
Addiction is a normal response to abnormal circumstances. Of course, it creates all kinds of problems on its own, so it’s not to say that its a good thing, but for a lot of people, it becomes the only thing that will help them endure what would otherwise be unendurable.
The healing of the addiction is not so much to do with quitting the substance as it is with healing the pain. Gabor Maté
What is addiction? How does Gabor Maté see it? “It’s useful to us look at the origin of the word. In Roman times when you owed somebody money and you couldn’t pay them back, you could become through a court ruling, an indentured slave to that person, an ‘addictus’.
“In it’s original meaning, addiction connotes slavery.”
How we become enslaved German psychotherapist, Alice Miller, in her most famous book, Prisoners of Childhood, opened the eyes of many, including Maté, regarding childhood trauma.
“Patterns that we developed in childhood to deal with the stressors and trauma that we encountered, the way we coped with things necessarily as children, then become the bars of our prison for the rest of our lives — or until we become conscious.
Rejection, alcoholism in the home, mental illness, violence, divorce, a sick sibling who got all of the attention, abuse, parents’ financial stress, lack of physical or emotional care, lack of safety — all lead to addictive behavior. And very few of these exist alone — there’s a compounding effect the more factors that are involved.
There are a number of ways to adapt to childhood trauma. One is desperate self-soothing.
“We see this in infants. Infants who are not rocked or held, will rock themselves, or they’ll suck their thumbs or the corner of their blanket.”
According to Matè:
At its core, addiction is an adaptation to deal with stress or distress that would otherwise be unbearable.
“Addiction is any pattern of behavior that you crave that gives you temporary pleasure or relief in the short term but negative consequences in the long term and that you persist in despite negative consequences.”
Notice that he says nothing about drugs. Drugs are one way, but there are addictions that don’t involve substances at all: relationships, gambling, sex, shopping, overspending, overwork.
What did the addiction do for you in the short term? Instead of looking at it as something bad, what was good about it? What do you get from it?
- Felt better
- Escape from the present moment, which is too distressing
- Confidence
- Return to the familiar
- An escape from pain
“What could be more normal than having confidence? What could be more normal than than wanting to exist in the familiar? What could be more normal than wanting to be free of distress or pain?
“In other words, these are perfectly valid, normal human desires. They’re so normal that there’s no human being on earth that doesn’t want them. There’s something extraordinarily normal about addiction.
“So the question is, why did you lack confidence, why did you want the familiar? What gave you the distress that you had to escape from? What made the present moment so unendurable?
Something happened and addiction was a normal response to it, which is why, according to Maté, that addiction as a brain disease is such nonsense.
“Yes, you can look at the addicted brain through imaging and see abnormalities. The assumption is that these abnormalities are inborn. They’re not.
“What medical students don’t hear, even though it’s not even vaguely controversial, is that the brain itself is shaped by early childhood experience, particularly the relationship between the parents and the child.
“When American Society of Addiction Medicine talks about addiction as a ‘primary brain disease’, yes, you can show brain disease, but it doesn’t begin with the brain, it begins with the circumstances that shape the brain. From a scientific point of view, that isn’t even controversial but it doesn’t enter the curricula of medical schools or education faculties for that matter, which is why addiction has been so tough to overcome.”
The antidote to addiction? The only way out of pain is through it. Of course, we don’t know this as infants, as children, but pain is patient. It waits for us.
“Addiction is all about not being able to be with that pain.
“That desperation to escape pain doesn’t work. As soon as the pain arises in the form of boredom or stress or distress or unhappy thoughts and I go to soothe myself with my addictive behavior, I’m actually further undermining myself.
“When I refuse to be with my own pain, I’m recreating the very experience that traumatized me in the first place, which was that when I was an infant, there was nobody there to receive my pain. And I’m unwilling to receive it myself.
“So every time I engage in that behavior, I’m wounding myself further. It’s not a self-laceration to say that, but that’s how it works. And that’s why addiction always makes it worse, because you keep wounding yourself by your refusal, by my refusal, to be with the pain.”
To be free from addiction, according to Maté, we must feel whatever it is that the drink, drug, a purchase, gambling is masking.
Are you willing to face the pain, the addictive behaviors, perhaps with a trusted friend or someone who has gone through and is on the other side of addictive behaviors? Or with a professional in this area?
Willingness to experience the pain is the first step toward freedom from addictive behaviors.
It can be quite magical.
This is, of course, a very brief introduction to Maté’s take on addictive behavior and overcoming it. It’s meaningful to me in my own struggles with self-defeating behavior: cigarettes, alcohol, relationships, which are behind me. Ah, but sugar and screens.
Here’s a short, sweet, uplifting story from Rick Allen
And more from JonesPJ
On the magic of bringing in the pain.
On relationship addiction, which involves over-idealizing the object or suspicion towards relationships. Upshot, with relationship addiction, one can’t enter into true intimacy.
