Descriptions:
Video Description
Addiction is not a moral failure — it is a language of distress. This lecture from Academy of Ideas draws on Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts to explain what addiction is really saying. Every addiction, Maté found, is an attempt to escape emotional pain, and that pain often begins in childhood trauma. The video traces how early wounding shapes the brain, and how a consumer culture deepens the inner void that substances promise to fill. The deeper hope: the brain is resilient, and renewal is possible as long as life exists.
Full Video Transcript
What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language
that tells us about a plight that must be understood. In the Buddhist conception of the
universe the wheel of life revolves through six realms, each representing a different approach
to existing in the world. One of these, the realm of the hungry ghosts, is inhabited by
creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs, and large bloated, empty
bellies. This is the realm where the addicts of the world reside. For no matter how much
the addict consumes, ingests, or possesses, they always want more, even as they experience
a decline in health and a ruining of their relationships and finances. I lose myself
when caught in one of my addictive spirals. Gradually, I feel an ebbing of moral strength
and experience myself as hollow. Emptiness stares out from behind my eyes.
In this video, drawing from Gabor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, we will
investigate the nature and roots of addiction. Maté defines an addiction as any repeated
behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless
of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. When thinking of addictions,
it is typical to focus on substance addictions. However, behavioral addictions are also common
and can be just as destructive to the individual’s life. Compulsive social media, pornography
or video game use, gambling, sex, shopping, or even activities such as exercise or work
can potentially turn into addictions, and so as Maté further clarifies, any passion
can become an addiction, but then how to distinguish between the two? The central question is,
who’s in charge, the individual or their behavior. It’s possible to rule a passion,
but an obsessive passion that a person is unable to rule is an addiction. If in doubt,
ask yourself one simple question. Given the harm you’re doing to yourself and others,
are you willing to stop? If not, you’re addicted. And if you’re unable to renounce
the behavior or to keep your pledge when you do, you’re addicted.
There has long been a debate as to what produces an addiction. Is it the person or the thing?
While some people have explained addiction as a problem that resides in people, a more
accurate explanation is that addiction is the result of an interaction between subject
and object. An addiction arises when an individual regularly craves a change in their subjective
or felt state of being and becomes dependent on an object or activity to produce the desired
experiential change. In her book Addiction by Design, Natasha Dahl-Schultz explains,
Just as certain individuals are more vulnerable to addictions than others, it is also the
case that some objects, by virtue of their pharmacological or structural characteristics,
are more likely than others to trigger or accelerate an addiction. Their distinctive
potency lies in the capacity to engender the sort of compelling subjective shift on which
some individuals come to depend. But given that we are, and always will be, surrounded
by objects and activities that have an addictive potential, in this video we are going to explore
the personal side of the addictive equation and investigate what it is that makes some
individuals more susceptible to addictions than others.
Gabor Maté spent his career working with hard drug addicts in Vancouver’s downtown
East Side. And as he argues, every addiction, severe or mild, substance-related or behavioral,
is an attempt to find relief from distress and emotional pain.
Addictions always originate in pain, explains Maté, whether felt openly or hidden in the
unconscious. Far more than a quest for pleasure, chronic substance use is the addict’s attempt
to escape distress. The forms of pain that lead an individual into an addiction are numerous
and varied. Some become addicts as a way to self-medicate depression, insecurities or
anxiety disorders. Others to cope with highly stressful jobs or relationships. Still others
to ward off the pain of aimlessness and despair over the meaninglessness of their lives.
Gabor Maté asked a 57-year-old, who had been addicted to drugs since he was a teen, why
he continued to use.
I don’t know. I’m just trying to fill a void, he replied. Emptiness in my life, boredom,
lack of direction. In many cases, the emotional pain one seeks to escape from through an addiction
has roots in the past, specifically in childhood. Studies have shown that the majority of hard
drug addicts grew up in abusive households. All parental difficulties reflect themselves
without fail in the psyche of the child, sometimes with pathological results, noted Carl Jung.
Parental influence on the child’s development and susceptibility to addictions later in
life cannot be overstated. For just as the child in the uterus is embedded in and completely
dependent on the mother’s body, so too in the first years of life. When the brain is
most malleable, a child is emotionally and psychologically fused with the parents. A
dysfunctional childhood spent bearing the brunt of parental anger and abuse imprints
the deep pain of trauma on the child’s mind and disrupts brain development in ways that
increase the likelihood of addiction. It’s just as many substance addicts say – they
self-medicate to soothe their emotional pain. But more than that, their brain development
was sabotaged by their traumatic experiences. The systems subverted by addiction – the
dopamine and opioid circuits, the limbic or emotional brain, the stress apparatus and
the impulse control areas of the cortex – just cannot develop normally in such circumstances.
But it is not just childhood trauma which makes one more susceptible to addiction.
Children who grew up with emotionally cold or distant caregivers are also much more likely
to turn to addictions in adulthood.
The psychologist Alan Shore called this situation of parental emotional absence proximal separation.
The parent is proximate, he or she is physically present and satiates all the child’s physical
needs, yet due to stress, depression, or other internal demons, the parent does not nurture
the child psychologically or emotionally, and as Maté explains further, a child can
also feel emotional distress when the parent is physically present but emotionally unavailable.
In normal circumstances a child who senses emotional separation will seek to reconnect
with the parent. Should the parent not respond, or not respond adequately, the child will
be left to his own inadequate coping mechanisms, for example, rocking or thumbsucking as ways
of self-soothing or tuning out to escape distress.
Children who have not received the attentive presence of the parent are at greater risk
for seeking chemical satisfaction from external sources later in life.
But in the modern day, even individuals who are blessed with a nourishing childhood are
not fully immune to addiction.
Or just like during the fall of Rome, when the people, en masse, turned to pleasure-seeking
to alleviate the anguish brought on by witnessing a dying culture, so too in our day many turn
to addictions as a way of self-medicating the despair stimulated by a bleak view of
the future of society.
Add on the fact that to conform in the modern world is to adopt consumerism as a way of
life, and to compulsively use technology, social media, and entertainment as a means
of escaping feelings of powerlessness and emptiness. And what you have is the perfect
social storm that has created a crisis of addiction.
A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture, writes Maté. The drug addict
is more painfully conscious of this void than most people. Many of us resemble the drug
addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the
center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit. With those sources of meaning
and value that are not contingent or fleeting, our consumerist acquisition, action, and image-mad
culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. Given the number of people
who grow up in abusive or emotionally absent households, coupled with the corrupt state of
society, it should come as no surprise that many people turn to drugs, alcohol, and behavioral
addictions as a way to cope with life. This turning is not totally irrational nor ineffective.
For addictions do work, at least temporarily, they are highly effective at easing distress
and emotional pain. Maté notes of a hard drug addict who reported that,
“…the reason I do drugs is so I don’t feel the feelings I feel when I don’t do
drugs.” Or as Vincent Folletti explained,
Dismissing addictions as bad habits or self-destructive behavior comfortably hides their functionality
in the life of the addict. Addictions are not only effective in providing relief from distress
and emotional pain, as indulgence can also temporarily lift one out of the monotony or
misery of everyday life, and into experiences laden with excitement, meaning, and bliss.
Thomas De Quincey, a 19th century English writer and self-professed opium addict,
explained that,
The subtle powers lodged in this mighty drug tranquilize all irritations of the nervous system,
sustain through twenty-four hours the else-drooping animal energies, all conquering opium. Thou only
givest these gifts to man, and thou hast the keys of paradise. The early 20th century psychologist
William James elaborates on the powers of alcohol to not only take the edge off, but also to induce
a state which simulates a spiritual experience, at least until the alcohol poisoning catches up
with the mind and body, or as he writes, the sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably
due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature.
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no.
Drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
It is in fact the great exciter of the yes function in man.
It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something
that we immediately recognize as excellent, should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the
fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. While addictions can
work in the short term, in becoming dependent on shortcuts to emotional relief and bliss,
a price is paid over time. The longer we persist in an addiction, the more our tolerance grows,
and the more we become dependent on the substance or activity in order to feel any positive emotions
at all. Slowly, but surely, the addiction becomes the focal point of our life, and everything else
which could provide a lasting fulfillment—our health, relationships, creativity, a career,
a life purpose—fades into the periphery. What is more, addiction changes the structure
of the brain in ways that undermine our capacity for voluntary control.
When caught in the grip of an addiction we often find ourselves in what is called brain lock.
Our actions follow our addictive cravings all the while one part of our mind watches attentively,
yet helplessly, knowing full well we are destroying our mind, body, and potential.
The heart of addiction is dependency, excessive dependency, unhealthy dependency,
unhealthy in the sense of unwhole, dependency that disintegrates and destroys.
Given the death grip of addiction, the vital question arises. What is the possibility of
overcoming an addiction. The problem facing any attempt at a renewed, addiction-free life
is that the very apparatus that needs to heal is the thing which, in an addiction,
is damaged. And as Maté cautions, the worse the addiction is, the greater the brain abnormality,
and the greater the biological obstacles to opting for health.
Luckily, our brains are remarkably resilient. Even well into old age it is possible for the brain to
rewire itself in ways that allow one to live, perhaps for the first time, a fulfilling,
healthy, and addiction-free life. And in subsequent videos, we are going to dive further into
the nature of addiction and explore some insights into how we can facilitate renewal and remove
ourselves, once and for all, from the realm of the hungry ghosts.
Not every story has a happy ending, writes Maté, but the discoveries of science, the
teachings of the heart and the revelations of the soul, all assure us that no human being
is ever beyond redemption. The possibility of renewal exists so long as life exists.
How to support that possibility in others and in ourselves is the ultimate question.
Source: Academy of Ideas