The Best Explanation of Addiction I’ve Ever Heard – Dr. Gabor Maté

the downtown east side of vancouver british columbia is one of the world's ground zeroes for addiction and that in a few square block radius we have thousands of people injecting inhaling and ingesting drugs of all kinds and paying dearly for it these people are often outside the law certainly beset by many medical problems due to injection drug use including psychosis including hiv including hepatitis c cancers they die of overdoses this is trench warfare and the people that are the front-line soldiers dying from it are they people affected by addiction so that's why i worked for 12 years what i learned could be summed up really very uh briefly by saying that addiction is not a choice that anybody makes it's not a moral failure it's not an ethical lapse it's not a weakness of character it's not a failure of will it's just how society depicts addiction nor is it an inherited brain disease which is how the medical tendency is to see it but it actually is it's a response to human suffering and all these people that i worked with had been severely traumatized as children all the women had been sexually abused all the men had been traumatized some of them sexually physically emotionally neglected and not only is that my perspective it's also what the scientific and research literature shows so addiction then is actually rather than being a disease as such or a human choice it actually is it's an attempt to escape suffering temporarily by the time i went to work there i had already been in family practice for 20 years i'd seen a lot and i was quite attuned to the impact of early childhood experiences on adult psychology and adult brain physiology but i just hadn't seen the depth and the degree until i went to work down there so really it dramatized and confirmed for me made it very palpable how addiction are a response to suffering and that what people need in response to addiction is not judgment and not simply symptom control they need to be helped to heal from their trauma because it is all about trauma the media the television cultural depiction of addicts is usually as desperate people but without showing why they're desperate so all this shows is the desperation for the drugs there's no indication of what's driving that desperation and hence you see them behaving in all kinds of dysfunctional ways aggressive or manipulative or unpleasant but again there's no three-dimensional sense of the reality of these people as to what that's really all about for them is it possible to cure people you're speaking from the western model where i am the expert and you're the one with the disease and i'm going to cure you i like you cure a piece of meat you know no the answer to that question frame that way is no it's not possible if you're asking is it possible for people to heal from trauma sufficiently that they don't have to keep escaping into addictions to lessen and suffering of their trauma yes that's entirely possible but the question is under what conditions is that possible and under the conditions that i'd obtained in london uk or vancouver british columbia or new york new york or any place under the conditions that obtained socially legally and from the perspective of medical practice it's hardly a likelihood because we're approaching it from the wrong direction and with the wrong perspective if i could constantly demonstrate that with this particular population i could affect the five or ten percent success rate of getting people to leave the addiction behind i'd be considered to be a genius because our results are so poor when i say ours i mean are specifically in vancouver i don't mean that i mean the overall treatment model for addiction is so poor and succeeding with the most affected segments of the population so i mean addictions are like everything else on a spectrum so a lot of people do heal from addictions but the most inveterate most entrenched addicts they have the hardest time and they're also the ones whom society gives the hardest time so that it makes it even harder to help them never mind they don't get the help they need they actually get actively punished and so what you've actually got is traumatized children when children are traumatized that affects how they feel about themselves which is deeply ashamed because the child always believes that it's about himself so if if i'm being hurt like this i got to be a terrible person or if i was sexually abused why didn't i fight back i must be a very weak person so there's a deep sense of shame then there's tremendous emotional pain that accrues from abuse and neglect tremendous emotional pain that is hardly possible for people to bear now they have to soothe their pain with substances or other compulsive behaviors then the trauma itself given that the human brain develops an interaction with the environment shapes the brain circuitry in such a way that the person will be more likely to find relief from the drugs so the very physiology of the brain is affected by early trauma so then you take these traumatized people and you make their habit illegal it's not illegal to drink yourself to death it's not illegal to make yourself sick with emphysema or lung cancer by means of cigarettes but it is illegal to use other substances so now you take these abuse traumatized people you place them outside the law you put them in jails and you hound them all their lives treating them like criminals and bad people and failures and rejects and less than a human and then we wonder how come they don't get better so it's a self-perpetuating cycle of taking traumatized people and then re-traumatizing them and then hoping at the same time why don't they listen why don't they get better already why don't they give it up well they don't give it up because the more hurt they are the more they need to escape in other words the addiction wasn't your problem your problem is that you have a lot of emotional pain you didn't know what to do it so the addiction was really an attempt to solve a problem so when you say why do people use substances or why do they engage in addiction in general it's because they have a problem they don't know what to do with and if you really understand their addiction we have to ask well what gave you so much emotional pain and how come you didn't have the internal resources this is not a judgment it's simply a inquiry how can you act at some point the internal resources to deal with that pain in a more creative forward-looking way that would help you resolve the pain rather than to perpetuate it so really really what it was is that the addiction came along to help you solve a problem you had no other solutions for at the time and that's the case for all addictions so why do people use why do people engage in addictions because they have deep emotional problems they don't have the means to resolve on their own that's why they use the average medical student until very recently has never even heard the word trauma in their education it doesn't show up we don't talk about it we don't talk about its impact on the brain on the personality and on the emotional life of people on its impact on people's physical health it's not a word that we mentioned we're trauma phobic as a fellow doctor said to me the medical profession is trauma phobic psychiatrists these days are trained mostly in this biological model of psychiatry where everything comes down to a biological brain disease here let's give you a pill the last thing most psychiatrists know how to talk about is actually emotional pain or its urgency in human experience you think they know how to do that but they don't they're not trained in it it's not part of the predominant medical ideology and you know as a physician i can tell you we like to think of medicals as a science and it has certainly great scientific achievements to its credit and great scientific insights to buttress its successes but it's as much as ideology as a science and ideology has certain hidden assumptions that are hidden from the people that believe in ideology and so that if something is excluded by ideology you just won't see it and so that you can be talking to somebody about your addiction and the simple question what did they do for you and how come you're in so much emotional pain doesn't occur to anybody you know trained in a classical manner now this is true not just for physicians it's true for a lot of psychologists as well who are more interested in solving your problems and getting you to overcome the behavior then in asking well okay where does behavior come from and what are you still carrying inside that's making you behave that way and how can we help you resolve what's inside you not just how do we help you change your behavior but how do we help you change now that's what healing is and that happens inside a person so it's never a question of anybody curing anybody else but we can guide people to healing if we ask the right questions

Channel: FightMediocrity

Views: 1,166,196

Rating: 4.9341092 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. Gabor Maté, gabor mate, addiction, when the body says no, gabor mate ted, jordan peterson, trauma, russell brand, tim ferriss, how culture makes us feel lost, pursuit of wonder, the power of addiction, london real, psychology, neuroscience, toxic culture, biology, medicine, brain development, why you are addicted, joe rogan, powerfuljre

Id: ys6TCO_olOc

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Bri_le]

I always feel like a fukin idiot for becoming an addict. I never really was severely “traumatized” or abused. I’m just a moron who likes to feel good and has anxiety.

[u/KatieLove_]

I love him! We watch a lot of his videos in an addiction class I am taking.

He is brilliant

[u/Donutbeforetime]

I got introduced to him by Johann Hari's book Chasing the Scream. Try and get your library to purchase a copy if they don't have it yet and spread the word.

It may not be for everyone (especially people in rehab facilities peddling the old incomplete theory of addiction and the idea that sobriety is our only option) but I credit the info in the book for being able to stick around this long.

[u/MethadoneFiend92]

Super interesting. Thanks for this OP

[u/Bigtiny50]

Thanks OP. This is amazing. So simple yet so complicated...

[u/oxycock710]

This really hits deep

[u/Divine-Nemesis]

Too relatable, thank you OP

[u/cunningdopeman]

This smacks. I wish I could talk with him weekly.

[u/noniboi]

very wise man and words to remember..also one very wise man told me few decades ago what addiction really is and why anyone can become an addict; bcs it's a brain chemical imbalance..we metabolize chemicals for our body to make new chemicals that affects all other chemicals in our brains and guts...and no one is immune, rich or poor, smart or stupid..