It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the… — Gabor Mate Copy Share Image
“We see that substance addictions are only one specific form of blind attachment to harmful ways of being, yet we condemn the… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“Another powerful dynamic perpetuates addiction despite the abundance of disastrous consequences: the addict sees no other possible existence for himself. His outlook… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“The successes (financial) represent addictive drives, whose negative impact in the world is tremendous. Who creates more suffering, somebody who sells an… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“To expect an addict to give up her drug is like asking the average person to imagine living without all her social… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“Human beings want not only to survive, but also to live. We long to experience life in all its vividness, with full,… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“One of the greatest difficulties we human beings seem to have is to relinquish long-held ideas. Many of us are addicted to… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“Far more than a quest for pleasure, chronic substance use is the addict’s attempt to escape distress. From a medical point of… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage… — 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
