Gabor Mate: The Nature of Addictions

 I offer you reflections on addictions by Gabor Mate, a fairly well-known Canadian addiction specialist. Gabor believes that "any type of drug acts as a pain reliever.  When people experience emotional pain, the same part of the brain that responds to physical pain, such as a fracture, reacts to it.

Eckhart Tolle, popularizing Buddhism for Western readers, also writes that pain creates addiction and addiction ends with it.

In essence, addiction is a desire to get rid of pain. Therefore, it makes sense to learn not about the origin of the habit, but about the origin of the pain.

As a rule, the cause is trauma or loss. Keith Richards (guitarist of the Rolling Stones), who got rid of addiction, said that he "broke" himself in order to escape from himself, even if only for a short time.

Why is it difficult for a person to be self-sufficient? Why can't he live in peace with himself? The Tibetan book of life and death says that any attempt to get away from pain creates even more suffering.

So how about being?

Only an environment in which a person can endure pain and not run away from it - can be saved from this problem.  For this, the support of other people is needed, but as a rule, they also do not know how to live with pain and accept the pain of other people, and they themselves find legal means of escape from pain and methods to avoid experiencing it."

Why is the dependence stronger?

"Once a patient said "I am not afraid of death, but of life." Need to look for an answer to the question, what does a person get from addiction that he doesn't have without it?  

This relief, peace of mind, feeling of control are temporary

Why is there no such thing in life without drugs?

Feeling discomfort from oneself, attempts to escape from one's mind drive people to addiction.

Someone is distracted by work, shopping, music, food, and the Internet.  Any behavior that causes long-term harm while providing temporary relief can be a drug.

It is like trying to fill a void inside that cannot be filled with something external.

The environment that surrounds a small child forms the brain. This can be understood from experiments on mice.  If you put food in the mouth of a mouse, it will swallow it, but if food is lying nearby, it will die of hunger. Simply because there are no dopamine receptors.  Dopamine is a substance produced when we are looking for food, sex, when we are moving towards something. Without it, there is no motivation.

This is exactly what happens to addicted people - when using the drug, there is an influx of dopamine. But that is not important. What is important is what happens to the brain before this?

Pleasures in themselves do not lead to addiction - all people use the Internet, buy and eat, but not all turn them into harmful behavior that destroys and at the same time beckons, despite the deplorable consequences.

The second experiment will help us understand this. When a newborn mouse is taken away from its mother, it does not cry. They just don't have endorphin receptors. Endorphin is morphine of an endogenous nature, that is, it is produced inside us. Painkiller, which we produce ourselves. Endorphins make you feel love, attachment. That is why newborn mice do not look for their mother.

Passion is connected with the fact that if a person experienced pain or trauma in childhood, the endorphin circuit does not develop normally. Without love in childhood, these important chemical interactions of endorphins are disrupted - that is why the brain becomes vulnerable to addictions.

Only the drug gives the experience of love and the relief of inner pain - as drug addicts say.

When the Germans entered Budapest, I was a couple of months old. My mother went to the pediatrician complaining that I was crying all the time. To this he replied that now all the babies in the patients are crying. It is clear that the babies did not know anything about the war. They read the horror and depression of their mothers.  The feeling that the world does not want them, their mother is not happy with them and probably does not love them - that is what formed the child's brain.

If they don't want me, then I will make sure that they need me. I will be an important person and then I will avoid the pain of feeling that I am not needed.

So I turned into a workaholic. And what kind of signal am I sending my children this way? That they are not needed either. This is how our injuries and pain are passed on to others - from generation to generation.  We cannot escape from this emptiness and always return to it.

We resent drug addicts, but in reality we are not much different from them. It's just that we have more decent habits.

Many of my patients in Canada are Indians who suffer from addiction. This is because their land was taken from them, they were considered second-class people, they were killed and humiliated. This is a pain that does not go away.

Maybe you think that great people are saved from this pain?

If you look at the biographies of the great people of history, you can see that they were all short people, not of a native nation (Stalin is a Georgian, Napoleon is a Corsican, Macedonian is not a Greek, Hitler is Austrian).  To one degree or another, they all felt inferior. Power was a remedy for pain, a way to feel good about yourself, even if you had to walk over corpses for this.

One might think that all the short-tempered people are power-loving, I will not confirm this. In any person, you can find a void that the person is trying to fill.

 Is there a way out?

Biblical history says that Jesus Christ was also tempted by the authorities, but he was able to refuse. He had no emptiness inside, so there was no need to fill it with something from the outside. Jesus said "The kingdom of God is within you".

Buddha said similarly: "Find the light within, become the light yourself."

If we fill with love the inner emptiness that causes pain, we will understand our own nature - the temptation to take advantage of addiction will be much weaker and we will have the strength to live in agreement and harmony with ourselves, without trying to run away from ourselves and of his pain.

I hope you liked this article by Gabor Mate, and you thought about what methods you choose to deal with internal pain.

Psychotherapy is just a way to fill this emptiness with love, to "love" a person who had little love in childhood, to reduce pain, to help a person get on the path of finding this world within, faith and of love In this sense, psychotherapeutic relationships are unique relationships. When love and attention are focused on the client, giving him the healing unconditional love and acceptance he needs.

Consultations of a psychotherapist online are a good alternative to face-to-face consultations, and you can use them. The initial consultation is absolutely free, go to register by clicking the button below.

Take action and you will succeed!