“Not only do we avert our eyes from the hardcore drug addict to avoid seeing ourselves; we do so to avoid facing… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“Although a youth culture was in evidence by the 1950s, the first obvious and dramatic manifestation of a culture generated by peer-orientation… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“The addict is re-traumatized over and over again by ostracism, harassment, dire poverty, the spread of disease, the frantic hunt for a… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“The indispensable foundation of a rational stance toward drug addiction would be the decriminalization of all substance dependence and the provision of… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“What, then, is addiction? In the words of a consensus statement by addiction experts in 2001, addiction is a “chronic neurobiological disease…… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“There is no evidence from anywhere in the world that harm reduction measures encourage drug use. Denying addicts humane assistance multiplies their… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize—winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid fifties and I was given Ritalin and Dexedrine. These are stimulant medications. They elevate… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international “War on Drugs” is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“As parents who make every effort we can to raise our children in loving security, we do not need to feel more guilt than… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“The fact is, we in this society are often quite removed from our own emotional reality.” — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“Many adults have not attained maturity — have not mastered being independent, self-motivated individuals capable of tending their own emotional needs and of respecting… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“If a mother has eight children, there are eight mothers. This is not simply because of the fact that the mother was different in… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“Without attachment, the parent succeeds at most in cowing a child into obedience, at the price of grave damage to the relationship and to… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“Attachment is our connection with the world. In the earliest attachment relationships, we gain or lose the ability to stay open, self-nurturing and healthy.… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“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… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“Even without world wars, revolutions and emigration, siblings growing up in the same home almost never share the same environment. More accurately, brothers and… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“We think that there are people who are normal over here, and then there’s the pathological ones who have depression, anxiety, addiction or schizophrenia… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“One cannot get much more vulnerable than to expose oneself psychologically. To share oneself with another and then be misunderstood or rejected is, for… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“The areas of the cortex responsible for attention and self-regulation develop in response to the emotional interaction with the person whom we may call… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“Peer-oriented children live in a universe of severely limited and superficial attachments. The quest for sameness being the least vulnerable way of attaching, it… — Gabor Maté Copy Share
“The United States contains less than 5 percent of the world’s population but houses nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.” — Gabor Maté Copy Share
