Gabor Mate Trauma Quotes

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.

All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case.

Here’s what Buddha left out, if I may be so bold: before the mind can create the world, the world creates our minds.

You are enough. You didn't deserve to be abandoned. You need to relearn that you are worthy of love.

What a bracing old, new thought: a society in which all have responsibility for the health of all, where the illness is seen as a manifestation of shared experience.

The pioneering U.S. internist and psychiatrist George Engel argued nearly half a century ago that the "crippling flaw" of modern medicine "is that it does not include the patient and his attributes as a person. Yet in the everyday work of the physician the prime object of study is a person." We must make provision for the whole person in their full "psychological and social nature," he said, calling for a biopsychosocial approach: one that recognizes the unity of emotions and physiology, knowing both to be dynamic processes unfolding in a context of relationships, from the personal to the cultural.

I should emphasize that mothers aren't alone in transmitting chronic disturbances of the body's stress apparatus to their young. In one experiment, healthy male mice were vexed by a series of stressors: frequent cage changes, constant light or white noise, exposure to fox odor, being restrained in a small tube, and so on. They were then mated with non-stressed females who provided their pups with perfectly good mothering. Their young showed impaired stress-response behaviors and blunted stress hormone patterns. In other words, despite the mothers' best efforts, the fathers had transmitted the disturbing effects through their sperm." In humans, paternal stress early in a child's life can also have long-term effects, into adolescence at the least. Adversity among both mothers and fathers bear "reliable linkages" to the epigenetic pro-files of the children, a group of researchers concluded.