Well-known in Canada and beyond, Dr. Gabor Maté works with addicts. In this talk, he talks about the root causes of drug addiction and how to deal with it.
“Harmful substances, whether opiates or cocaine or other types of drugs, actually act as a pain reliever when used.
The same part of the brain is responsible for physical pain and emotional distress.
When people suffer from emotional inconsistency, the same brain region reacts as when stabbed. Eckhart Tolle said very accurately that addiction begins with pain and ends with pain.
All addictions are attempts to suppress pain.
When I work with drug addicts, the first question that always worries me is not where the habit came from, but where the pain came from. And it turns out to be an emotional loss or trauma. Every heavily addicted drug addict from the eastern part of this city has been traumatized. There is no chance of finding a woman on these streets who has not experienced sexual abuse.
Any kind of addiction, whether it's addiction to sex or the Internet, or to shopping, or to work, is all about avoiding suffering.
The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (who was known to be deeply addicted to heroin) said that we "break" ourselves in different ways in order to escape from our presence for at least a few hours.
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But why would someone not want to be with themselves? Because of your too deep grief and too much pain.
So I don't care what they say about genetics or choice or any other nonsense. The answer is always pain.
There are amazing lines in the "Tibetan Book of Life and Death". Whatever you do, don't try to get away from the pain, but stay with it. Because any attempt to get away from pain causes more suffering. This is what happens with drug addicts.
But the question is, how can people deal with their grief?
Answer: only by feeling the compassion / mercy of the other person.
As another teacher said, only when people feel compassion can they see the truth. Thus, addicts need a compassionate environment that allows them to survive pain without having to run away from it.
All attempts to escape, as another teacher said, most likely leads to more suffering, it is an attempt to escape from oneself.
Therefore, you just need to stay with pain, and to be with it, you need support. But we live in a society that always chooses the fastest relaxation methods, immediate gratification or distraction.
In other words, we live in a culture that is economically and psychologically incapable of supporting people. As a result, it is very difficult for this society to deal with drug addiction …
It all comes down to the fact that at some point you have to find a way to be with your pain and in the end you will be able to understand what all this really means."
“I have come to talk with you about drug addiction, the power of addiction, and also about the addiction to power.
As a physician, I practice in Vancouver, Canada. I have worked as people who are very, very addicted. With people who use heroin, cocaine, alcohol, crystalline methamphetamine and any other drug known to man. These people are suffering.
If a doctor's success is measured by the lifespan of his patients, then I'm a failure. Because my patients die very young. They die from HIV, from hepatitis C, from infections of the heart valves, from infections of the brain, from blood poisoning. They die of suicide, overdose, violence, accidents.
And if you look at them, then remember the words of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfuz: “Nothing captures the consequences of a sad life like the human body”.
Because these people are losing everything.
They lose health, lose beauty, teeth, wealth, they lose human relationships and as a result, they often lose their lives.
But nothing can keep them from addiction. Nothing can make you refuse it. The addiction remains stronger. And then the question arises: why?
One of my patients told me: “I am not afraid to die. I'm more afraid to live. The question we must answer is: why are people afraid of life?
If you want to understand addiction, you do not need to consider what it led to; you need to find out what caused it. In other words: to understand what a person gets from his addiction? What does he get that he otherwise would not have?
Addicts get relief from pain, a sense of peace, a sense of control, a sense of calm … very temporary.
The question arises: why is all of the above absent in their lives, what happened to them?
Drugs like heroin, morphine, codeine, cocaine, alcohol are all pain relievers. One way or another, they all relieve pain. And then the question is not "why is drug addiction?", But "why is pain?"
I just finished reading the biography of Keith Richards, guitarist for the Rolling Stones. Many will be surprised, but he is still alive, despite the fact that for a long time he suffered from severe heroin addiction. And in his biography, the musician writes that, depending on him, he was looking for oblivion, it was an attempt to forget. Keith said, "We go into these convulsions to stop being ourselves for a few hours."
And I understand very well what kind of discomfort you can experience from yourself, being in your own skin. I know the desire to escape my own mind.
The great British psychiatrist R. D. Lange said that there are three things that people fear. They are afraid of death, other people and their own mind. For a long period of my life, I wanted to distract myself from my own mind, because I was afraid to be alone with it. How did I get distracted?
Well, I've never used drugs, but I got distracted through work, completely immersed in it. And through shopping. In my case, they were classical music CDs.
In this I developed a real addiction. In one week, I spent $ 8000 on CDs of classical music. Not because I wanted to, but because I could not help returning to the store.
As a doctor, I often delivered childbirth. And one day I left a woman in labor in the hospital to get more classical music. I wanted to be back in time, but once you are in the store, you can't leave so quickly. Those classical music dealers in the aisles are the real evil: “Hey buddy, have you listened to the last cycle of Mozart's symphonies? Not yet? Well…"
I missed the birth of that child. I came home and lied to my wife about it.
Like any drug addict, I lied about it and ignored my kids because of my obsession with work and music. So I know what it's like to run from myself.
My definition of addiction is any behavior that gives you temporary relief, temporary pleasure, but is harmful in the long run, has negative consequences, and you cannot refuse it, despite all the negativity.
Based on this definition, you can understand that there are many, many dependencies.
Yes, there is an addiction to drugs, but there is also an addiction to consumerism, to sex, to the Internet, to shopping, to food.
Buddhists have such a concept - "hungry ghosts". They are creatures with big empty stomachs, small skinny necks and tiny mouths, so they can never get enough to get enough, they can never fill an inner void.
And we are all "hungry ghosts" in this society. We all have such a void and many are trying to fill it from the outside. And addiction is an attempt to fill this void from the outside.
Now, if you don't mind, let's ask ourselves: why do people experience pain?
Don't look at their genetics, look at their lives. In the case of my patients, who had the highest addiction, it is completely obvious where the pain came from.
Because they were all abused. They were abused as children.
Over a 12 year period, I have worked with hundreds of women. They all went through childhood sexual abuse. Men were also traumatized - sexual abuse, neglect, physical abuse, neglect and emotional pain over and over again. That's where the pain comes from.
And there's something else here: the human brain.
The human brain, as you have already heard, develops interaction with the environment. It's not just genetic programming. The child's environment actually shapes the development of the brain. Now I will tell you about two experiments with mice.
You take a mouse and put food in your mouth. He eats it, enjoys it, swallows it. But if you put food a few inches from his nose, he won't budge to eat it. In fact, he will starve to death instead of eating. Why? Because it genetically lacks receptors for a chemical in the brain called dopamine.
Dopamine is a stimulus and chemical motivation. It is generated when we are moved by something, when we are happy, excited, energetic, curious, when we are in search of food or a sexual partner. Without dopamine, we have no motivation.
Now what do you think the addict gets?
When he uses cocaine, crystalline methamphetamine, or another drug, dopamine rushes into his brain. The question is, what happened to the brain in the beginning?
That drugs are addictive is a myth. Drugs themselves are not addictive because most people who try them do not become addicts.
So why are some people addicted to drugs?
Likewise, some people develop an addiction to food, but not all; all people shop, but some are addicted to them; TV is not addictive for everyone, but some people cannot live without it.
Therefore, the question arises: where is this receptivity?
Here's another little experiment with mice. If newborn mice are separated from their mother, they will not cry for her. What would this lead to in the wild? They would die, because only their mother protects, raises, educates them.
But they have not developed receptors that chemically link brain regions for endorphins. Endorphin is an endogenous morphine. It is our own natural pain reliever. Morphine or endorphins also allow you to experience love, feelings of affection of children for their parents and affection of parents for children. Thus, these little mice with no endorphin receptors in their brains naturally do not call their mother.
In other words, addiction to drugs and, of course, heroin and morphine are caused by their action in the endorphin system. This is why they work. The question is, what happens to people who need these chemicals from the outside?
If they were abused in childhood, then these patterns do not develop. When you have no love and no connection in life at a very, very early age, then these important parts of the brain simply do not develop properly. They also develop abnormally under conditions of abuse. The brain then becomes susceptible to drugs.
But now they feel fine. Pain relief comes. They feel love. One patient told me: “When I first used heroin, I felt like in a warm and tender embrace. It's like a mother hugging her child."
Now I had the same emptiness, but not to the same degree as my patients. Here's what happened to me:
I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 to a Jewish family before the Germans occupied Hungary. You know what happened to the Jewish people in Eastern Europe.
I was 2 months old when the German army entered Budapest. The next day my mother called the pediatrician and said: "Please come and examine Gabor, he cries all the time." And the pediatrician replied: "Of course, I will come to him, but I must tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying."
But why? Did the children know about Hitler or the genocide or the war?
Not.
What we read was the stress, horror and depression of our mothers. This influenced the formation of the child's brain. And, naturally, this is how I received the message that the world does not want me, because if my mother is not happy next to me, I must be not a wanted child.
Why did I later become a workaholic?
If they don't want me, then at least they will need me. I will become an important doctor and they will need me. That way I can smooth over the feeling of being unnecessary.
And what does it mean?
This means that I work all the time. And when I don't work, then I buy music.
What message are my children subconsciously receiving? Exactly the same - that they are not needed by anyone. This is how we pass on trauma, pass on suffering, unconsciously, from one generation to the next.
Obviously there are many ways to fill this void, each person has their own way. But emptiness always returns to what we did not receive when we were very small.
And then we look at the addict and say, “How can you do this to yourself? How can you enter into your body this terrible substance that can kill you? But look at what we are doing with the Earth. We throw into the atmosphere, into the oceans and into the environment everything that kills us and poisons the planet.
Now answer, which addiction is stronger? Oil addiction? From consumerism? What does the most harm?
And yet we judge drug addicts because we actually see that they are just like us. But we do not like it, and we say: "You are different from us, you are worse than us."
On the plane from Sao Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, I read the New York Times for June 9th. There was an article about Brazil and about a man named Nisio Gomez, the leader of the Guaraní people from the Amazon, who was killed last November, you have probably heard of him.
Gomez was shot because he defended his people from large farmers and companies that were taking over and destroying rainforests and destroying the environment considered to be the homeland of the Indians in Brazil.
And I can tell you that it came from Canada. The same thing happened there. Many of my patients are Indian. Indigenous people in Canada are heavily addicted. They make up a small percentage of the population. But they make up a large percentage of prisoners, drug addicts, the mentally ill, and people who commit suicide. Why?
Because their homeland was taken away from them. Because they have been killed and abused from generation to generation.
And here's the next question: you can understand the suffering of indigenous peoples and you can understand that suffering is pushing them to find a way to relieve the pain of drugs, but what about the people who do it? What is their dependence?
They are dependent on power. Dependent on wealth. Dependent on acquisitions. They want to get bigger.
When I tried to understand the addiction to power, I looked at some of the most influential people in history: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin. It is very interesting.
First of all, why do they need so much power?
An interesting fact: physically they were all very small people, somewhere around my height or even shorter. They came from other peoples, not from the local population. Stalin was Georgian, not Russian; Napoleon was a Corsican, not a French; Alexander the Great was not Greek and Hitler was Austrian, not German.
Thus, they could have feelings of insecurity and inferiority.
They needed power to feel good, to be exalted. And in order to get this power, they were ready to fight and kill many people, just to support this power.
I am not suggesting that only small people can be power-hungry, but it is interesting to consider these examples, because when talking about power, about addiction to power, there is always a void that you are trying to fill from the outside.
Napoleon, even in exile on the island of St. Helena, having lost his power, said: "I love power, I love power." He could not imagine himself without power. I could not imagine myself without external power.
It is very interesting to compare him with Buddha or with Jesus. If you read their story, you will find that both were tempted by the Devil, and one of the temptations that he offered them was power, earthly power. And they both refused.
Why did they say no? Both refused because they had an inner strength, and there was no need to seek it outside.
They also refused, because they did not want to control people, but wanted to teach them. They wanted to teach people by their example, soft speech, wisdom, and not by force. Therefore, they gave up power.
And it’s also very interesting what they said about it. Jesus said that power and reality are not outside, but within us. He said, "The kingdom of God is within you."
And the Buddha before his death, when the monks grieved and cried, said to them: “Do not mourn for me, do not worship me. Find the light within yourself, become the light yourself."
So we are looking at this complex world with a crumbling environment and global warming and the devastating oceans. Let's not hope for people in power to change things, because people in power - I don’t want to talk about this - but very often they are some of the most empty people in the world and they are not going to change anything. for us.
We must find this light within ourselves, find light in communities and in our own wisdom and in our own creativity.
We cannot expect people in power to do something better for us, because they will never do it until we do.
They say that competition, aggression, selfishness lie in human nature. Quite the opposite is true. Human nature is in fact in cooperation, human nature in generosity, in a community of like-minded people.
What we see here at this conference - people exchanging information, people receiving information, people striving for a better world - this is human nature.
And when you find this light inside, when you find your own essence / nature, then we will be kinder to ourselves and to nature.
Thank.
