Gabor Maté on Addiction

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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”. 

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)

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. 

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. 

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 

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