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Gabor Maté on Addiction

Feb 02, 2023 · 2 mins read

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The easiest way to understand addiction according to Hungarian-Canadian addiction specialist Gabor Maté is that ‘it is any activity that you have a compulsive relationship with’. You know it's harmful for you in the long run but you do it anyway because you cannot stop. 

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Now why does this happen? Mainly because our minds have formed a memory of the experience which is now wired into our subconscious & the subconscious remembers the pleasure and temporary relief it felt when indulging in that activity. 

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A common understanding of addiction is that its difficult to break (and easy to embody) because its the set homeostasis of the system- our “default”, that we have become used to. 

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Gabor, given his extensive first-hand work in Vancouver with heroin addicts, says that this “default” is often a form of self-medication for unaddressed emotional pain, trauma or stress.

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He says, “addiction is neither a choice nor primarily a disease. It originates in a human being’s attempt to solve a problem- the problem of emotional pain, overwhelming stress, of lost connection, of loss of control, and of deep discomfort with the self”. 

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He asserts that addictions are separated from each other only by degrees of severity, which are tied to socioeconomic factors & personal history. For instance, some addictions are criminalized (hard drugs) while some are more or less tolerated (alcoholism, smoking)

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Then comes addictions that are encouraged & even rewarded (say workaholism, the quest for power/wealth). Thus, standards of acceptable/unacceptable addictions are arbitrary and have more to do with culture’s self-delusions than with the truth of addiction. 

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That is because the symptoms of addiction- obsessive preoccupation, the negative impacts, the relapses, the rationalizing, the feeling of nagging emptiness at the core of the addict’s experience of life- are same for ALL addictions regardless. 

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Maté advocates for a“compassionate inquiry” into the underlying issues of addictions along with a holistic approach to addiction treatment that considers the individual's social, environmental and psychological factors 

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Closely connected to Addiction is Repression- another way in which we choose to deal with our problems. Read up on this here.

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