Dr. Gabor Maté: Understanding the Nature of Addiction

If you suffer from an illness, either mental illness or physical illness, take a moment and think back to your childhood - was it ‘a happy childhood’? 

Dr. Gabor Maté has dedicated his life to exploring the nature not only of addiction but of trauma too. He’s discovered that diseases don’t just come along randomly, out of the blue - they reflect the course of a person’s life, beginning in childhood. And nowhere is this more true than for addiction: 

“The whole point about addiction is that it’s a short term benefit for long term pain. So what I'm saying about addiction is that it's not a disease, it's actually a solution to a problem, the solution of emotional pain.”

In this episode of Into The Magic Shop, Gabor reveals how he’s never met someone with addiction who didn’t have childhood trauma: 

“Parents often have their own issues, invariably, as parents, as I did, we pass on our issues to our kids until we've worked them out ourselves. So a lot of these happy childhoods despite all the parental love and even the external stability, there is a lot of emotional suffering.”

From how to train yourself not to be reactive, to how adverse childhood experiences impact us in later life, this episode is varied, but it all comes back to one thing and that is this:

“The desperation to find peace and resolution is not going to come from the outside. And that's where you have to start reflecting internally. But you have to get there. And usually it takes us a lot of suffering to get to that point.”

On today’s podcast:

• Addiction stems from childhood trauma
• Train yourself not to be reactive
• Adverse childhood experiences
• Why the prison system itself is criminal
• The importance of expressing your own truth