BREAKING FREE OF OLD HABITS, ADDICTION, AND PAST TRAUMAS

Breaking Free of Old Habits, Addiction, and Past Traumas

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www.themasterseries.com

BREAKING FREE OF OLD HABITS, ADDICTION, AND PAST TRAUMAS

with Dr. Gabor Maté

http://www.themasterseries.com


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www.themasterseries.com www.drgabormate.com

TOLLE’S “A NEW EARTH”, THE PAIN BODY, AND WHO WE ARE

One of the books that I would give to my younger self to read is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. When we’re young, we identify so much with our ideas, our bodies, and our history. We think that’s all we are. Tolle’s book offers a different perspective: that there is a deeper awareness inside of us that is more true to the essence of who we are than simply the thoughts, ideas, and actions we have been caught up in. There is a space between who we are internally and the form we’ve taken in history - and that is a wonderful realization.

Tolle also introduces the concept of the pain body. The pain body is the accumulated hurts, grievances, emotional reactive patterns, and negative beliefs that life has imposed on us because our way of life is so often traumatic. It lives within us as an almost independent entity and at times can take over our functioning.

In my work as a physician and in my personal life, I’ve seen that the pain body - the accumulated ingrained history of pain - runs people’s lives. So much of our lives become about experiencing pain or running away from it, and this is where additions come in.

There’s something about Tolle and the sense of being that he manifests that makes a difference to be around it even when you’re just reading the pages of a book. It’s not just empty teachings; it’s not just words. It’s uplifting and opens you up somehow - it’s one of the books that helped me open up my consciousness.

Gabor Maté (pronounced GAH-bor MAH-tay) is a retired physician who, after 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness.

The bestselling author of four books published in twenty-seven languages, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. His book on addiction received the Hubert Evans Prize for literary non-fiction.

For his ground-breaking medical work and writing he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction; When the Body Says No; Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How ADD Originates and What You Can Do About It; and (with Gordon Neufeld) Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. Gabor’s next book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture is due in Autumn, 2022.

To learn more, join his e-news here: www.drgabormate.com


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REALIZING OUR TRUE ESSENCE

WHAT IS ADDICTION?

Some people I know experienced a big moment of realization where they suddenly became aware of that space and the reality of their true essence manifested throughout them. Tolle is one of them - he went through tremendous suffering before a life-changing experience suddenly opened up his life. Personally, I can’t say I had that experience.

It’s not like I’m always aware of the space between my life circumstances, upbringing, and addictions, and my true essence.

Addiction isn’t a bad thing - it’s not a mistake, a disease, or a sin. Addiction is a process manifested in any behavior that someone finds temporary relief or pleasure in, and therefore craves even though it has negative consequences in the long term. It’s the inability or refusal to give up on that pleasure despite the negative consequences that occur. This is what addiction is, regardless of the object of that craving.

If you ask yourself whether you have ever had such an addictive pattern in your life, the answer is most likely yes. You can ask yourself what was wrong with the addiction, but also - what was right about it? What did it do for you in the short term? What did it give you that you needed or wanted at that time?

Take the example of addiction to people-pleasing - the seeking and needing the approval of others. It is an addictive behavior, yes, but it is also a behavior that gives you companionship and recognition; it is a behavior that ends loneliness. Human contact and companionship are beautiful things.

Addiction is not the problem, it is the solution to a problem. Here, the problem is isolation and the sense of not having value or not being worthy of contact. And this sense of worthlessness comes from something that happens in childhood. Life should present the circumstances

for us to be valued and accepted for exactly who we are. When we don’t get these circumstances, we become people pleasers.

All addictions work in this way. Addiction is simply compensation for something that we lost in childhood: something that we had every right to expect life to give us; something for which there is essentially a human need. Whether it’s gambling, sex, work, or shopping, they always give us something that we have lost.

We need to reframe the way we talk about addiction. The question isn’t “why the addiction?” but “why the pain?”. Addiction isn’t a disease that started in the brain. It’s how the brain responds to life circumstances - to the pain of life. The brain is shaped by life experience, and we have to look to people’s experiences for the answers to so many human conditions.

It depends on the day, and the moment of the day - sometimes I still get caught up in pretty trivial things. I’m not an example of someone who’s fully realized their essence.

I get glimpses of it: sometimes in work, sometimes in real life, sometimes in traditional ceremonies, sometimes in psychedelic ceremonies. But, I can’t give you a single transformational moment where it happened and I can say that “I got it”. Because for me, “getting it” is still daily work - it continues to be, and I expect it will always continue to be.




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EARLY CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE

FAULT AND RESPONSIBILITY

I recently read a family history written by a deceased cousin of mine. She and her family looked after me for a month when I was a year old and my mother had to give me up because she couldn’t guarantee that she would live another day, let alone that I would. They looked after me in terrible conditions. My cousin wrote - and I had never read this before - that my big black eyes were filled with fear. The only thing she could see on my face was fear.

Since then, I’ve had depression, lived with ADHD, and been addicted to work and shopping. I’ve lied, I’ve cheated, and ignored all my work and family. Almost two years ago, I went to the Amazon jungle to take part in a ceremony with native, traditional healers. These people knew nothing about me - nothing about my history or my life as a jew under the Nazis. They just knew that I had come to lead a retreat for doctors and healers. And they told me that I couldn’t lead anybody; I had to heal myself.

I’m not saying that our childhood experiences, our guilt, and the compensations that follow are our parents’ fault - the concept of fault doesn’t exist in my understanding of things. If your father was an alcoholic, that too would be a result of his early childhood experience, and we would have to look to his parents - and so on. We would end up blaming Adam and Eve or an ape ancestor sitting in a tree. In other words, there’s no end to the blame game.

No ego is personal; it’s just what happens to people. No parent deliberately hurts their children - it’s not a fault. We need to be compassionate towards every generation and towards everybody, and realize that we get caught up in patterns. We pass on these patterns, not because it’s our fault, but because we don’t know any better.

They said when I was small I had a big scare that I had been carrying my whole life and everything that came with it.

So much of addiction and pain is related to early childhood experiences, in particular our interactions with our parents. If parents are in pain, struggling, or afraid, their children pick up on it. Children often process this information by thinking about themselves, and they hold themselves responsible for their parent’s pain. It’s not about who you are or what you have or haven’t done - children naturally believe it’s all about them.

As a result, many people grow up with a sense of guilt or shame that they didn’t make their parents happy. Of course, they couldn’t make them happy - it is not the job of a child to do that. But children take on the guilt automatically and internalize it into a general feeling of shame. Many people describe shame as a consequence of addiction; in reality, they felt ashamed long before they became addicted.

That’s not to say no one holds responsibility. There’s a difference between fault and responsibility - fault comes into it when you are fully aware of the harm you are causing and you do it deliberately. This is very rare. But if I do something - that is, if a certain path emerges from some action I take - then who is going to respond to that, if not me? Taking responsibility means that once I have realized the effect of my actions, I do what I can to clean it up. That’s a big responsibility, but it has nothing to do with it being my fault, and we really have to learn not to blame ourselves.




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THE ADDICTED BRAINIn the addicted brain, there’s a number of circuits that just don’t work very well. One of them is the endorphin circuitry. Endorphins are internal opiates, which act on the opiate receptors in our brain to provide pain relief, pleasure, and the emotional and physical bandwidth necessary for life. They also connect us to other people: opiates, along with oxytocin, keep us connected to the people we need to stay close to to survive. They keep parents attached to their infants; and infants to their parents. Without this, there would be no infant survival.

In people who are addicted to heroin, the brain circuitry doesn’t function well. Heroin is a kind of opiate that acts on our natural opiate receptors similarly to our endorphins. When someone takes heroin, they suddenly experience love, connection, pain relief, and pleasure - all totally normal human aspirations. Opiates are really all about love.

Then there is the dopamine circuitry. Dopamine is our incentive motivation circuitry: without dopamine, we’re lifeless, inert, and without incentive or motivation to do anything. Dopamine flows when we are seeking food, a sexual partner, and other basic life functions. We can see how important it is.

In people who are prone to addiction, the dopamine circuits don’t function very well either- and that’s where addictions take root. Work addiction isn’t an addiction to work, but an addiction to the dopamine that’s released in your brain through the activity.

The only difference between substance and non-substance addictions is that with the first kind the dopamine is external, whereas with the second it is released internally by certain behavior. For a gambler, the dopamine is from gambling; for some with a cocaine addiction, it is from cocaine.

In all cases, they’re seeking the same hit of dopamine.

The other circuits that don’t work well in the addicted brain are our stress regulation circuits and our impulse regulation. Stress regulation is supposed to calm our body down so it doesn’t go into overdrive and impulse regulation tells us to stop something we feel like doing if it’s a bad idea. People with addictions don’t have that - they keep doing what is bad for them.

All these circuits develop in childhood, in interaction with the environment. The brain is a dynamic social organ: its circuitry; its systems development; the availability of receptors for the neuro-chemicals like serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, GABA, endorphins, and dopamine. The more stressed the environment is, the less the circuits develop properly, and the more prone we are to developing an addiction later on. Even in the uterus, a mother’s stress can affect their child’s dopamine receptors and stress regulation. That child will be more prone to addiction.

So yes, addiction is about the brain, but the brain is not the primary source. The brain is the effect of life history and life experience. This also means that if we change our life experiences and our relationship with ourselves, we can change our brains. It’s no easy task, but we can do it - that’s the beauty of it.




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RECOVERING YOURSELFWithout awareness, there are no other steps. Awareness and recognition of the space between ourselves and the life experiences that have happened to us. In 12 step groups, when someone stands up and says, “My name is Drew and I’m an addict”, there is some value to that because the person accepts responsibility for their behavior. But it’s a double-edged sword because nobody is an addict - that’s not who they are. An addiction is a pattern of behavior to soothe some kind of pain.

It would be more accurate to stand up and say, “My name is Drew, and I have had pain all my life which I’ve soothed through this particular behavior, but that’s not who I am. That’s just my coping mechanism”.

The awareness is a big part of getting connected to the pain - the pain that created the void that you soothed by the addiction.

Ultimately, healing has to do with working through that pain, working through the trauma, and finding our deep, truer self underneath all that. If we just try to stop a certain addictive behavior, we haven’t dealt with the source of that behavior - and the emptiness underneath is still there.

Look at the word “recovery”: what does it mean to recover something? It means to find it. We’ve lost contact with something, lost touch with it, and we find it, we recover it. Someone who has been through addiction recovers themselves - they find themselves. That’s ultimately what recovery is.

One of my favorite messages from A New World is that it’s in the nature of humanity to have something, lose it, and find it again; but find it at a deeper level with a level of meaning that cannot be lost. So we have these things, we lose them, and then we step back into them. I often think of that in the context of recovery.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIETAL CHANGE

The illnesses in this society, physical and mental, are not abnormalities. They’re normal responses to an abnormal culture. This culture is abnormal when it comes to real human needs. If we had a society geared up to meet human needs, would we be destroying the earth through climate change? Would we be putting an extra burden on certain minority people? Would we be selling people a lot of goods that they don’t need or are harmful to them? In relation to human need, this is insanity.

Trauma is an incredibly important phenomenon in human life and has a huge impact on all of us. Why have we ignored it for so long? Because denial of reality is built into the system: that is how the system survives.

While trauma is becoming more widely discussed among medics and scientists, the average medical student still doesn’t get a single lecture on trauma in their four years of medical school. Trauma is related to addiction, all kinds of mental illnesses, and most physical health conditions, but they don’t study that science. This reflects society’s denial of trauma, and the medical system simply reflects the dominant needs of the largest society.




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How do we create change on a social level? I think that whatever platform or sphere of influence we have, we have to create consciousness. We want people to become aware of how things are like they did after the George Floyd murder last summer. The murder only became public knowledge because a 17-year-old took a cell phone video, but it led to the Black Lives Matter movement. People began to wake up.

For some people, waking ourselves up will take the form of activism - political activity - because it just can’t happen on an individual level. I can’t tell people what they should do. but whatever degree of consciousness you have manifested on whatever level you can - through activism, in your personal life, through the work that you do, or in your social relationships - is something that you can do.

Individual actions alone are important, but the problems are systemic. We need to look at these larger systemic issues, and these are political and social questions. We need to use our awareness, our consciousness, to contribute. One of my most repeated mantras is by a Jewish rabbi who lived about 100 years before Christ, and he said, “The task is not yours to finish, but neither are you free not to take part in it”. He’s talking about the task of changing the world. BREAKING FREE OF OLD HABITS,

ADDICTION, AND PAST TRAUMASwith Dr. Gabor Maté



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BREAKING FREE OF OLD HABITS, ADDICTION, AND PAST TRAUMAS

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