“In any disease, say smoking-induced lung or heart disease, organs and tissues are damaged and function in pathological ways. When the brain… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of “curing” addiction—that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits… — 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
“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
“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
“And then there’s physical dependence. As defined in medical terms, physical dependence is manifested when a person stops taking a substance and,… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture. The drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“All addictions — whether to drugs or to nondrug behaviours — share the same brain circuits and brain chemicals. On the biochemical… — 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
“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
“Beauty Junkies is the title of a recent book by New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski, “a self-confessed recovering addict of cosmetic… — 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
“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side. I believe there is one addiction process, whether it is manifested… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“Many people fear that decriminalization and the controlled dispensing of drugs will lead to widespread substance use among people who are now… — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse.… — 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 Image
“The fact is, we in this society are often quite removed from our own emotional reality.” — Gabor Maté Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
