Addiction is pretty simple. It's what happens when people don't get what they need, and end up soothing themselves.

— Gabor Maté

Adults envy the open-hearted and open-minded explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own capacity for wide-eyed wonder.

— Gabor Maté

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.

— Gabor Maté

It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behavior.

— Gabor Maté

Narrow behaviorist thinking permeates political and social policy and medical practice, thechildrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academic discourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviors without a full understanding of how and why those behaviors arise. “Inner causes are not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an expert on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings, without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pin down at times. Behaviors, especially compulsive behaviors, are often the active representations of emotional states and of special kinds of brain functioning. As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment. Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive to change not them but their environments. These are the only things we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much that we can do.

— Gabor Maté

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 center of all addictive behaviors. 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.

— Gabor Maté

Passion creates, addiction consumes.

— Gabor Maté

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

— Gabor Maté

The distressing internal state is not examined: the focus is entirely on the outside: What can Receive from the world that will make me feel okay, if only for a moment? Bare attention can shower that these moods and feelings have only the meaning and power that she gives them. Eventually she will realize that there is nothing torn away from. Situations might need to be changed, but there is no internal hell that one must escape by dulling or stimulating the mind.

— Gabor Maté

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

— Gabor Maté