A Candid Conversation on Addiction Featuring Dr. Gabor Maté and Joe Polish #159

Episode Summary

Addiction is another word for suffering. It’s about pain and the attempts to find a solution to deal with that pain. Joe interviewed Dr. Gabor Maté for an hour on addiction, they also discussed emotional pain, distress, and anxiety.

Here’s a glance at what you’ll learn from Dr. Gabor in this episode:

  • Dr. Gabor Maté defines what addiction is and why it’s actually a solution to pain
  • How the criminal justice system treats addiction and why we must change how people view and treat addicts
  • The reason why every case of addiction originates from trauma and deep pain
  • Joe shares his struggle with addiction and Gabor shares his personal story of workaholism
  • Gabor talks about “respectable addictions” and how disdain gets projected onto other people
  • How parents unknowingly pass on trauma from one generation to the next…
  • Why we can’t punish pain out of people and how we can help people fighting silent battles
  • What we can do to heal the family system, heal the individual and recover from addiction

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Show Notes

  • Addiction is complex but can manifested in any behavior, not just drugs or gambling.
  • Nearly everybody has had an addiction at some point in their life.
  • The addiction isn’t the problem, developing an addiction is your way of trying to solve the real problem.
  • Emotional pain is almost always the underlying cause of addiction.
  • The question is what happened for you to feel pain, and what can you do to address it.
  • We all need to be wanted and your desire will appear in ways that are often addictive.
  • Right now the criminal justice system is treating addicts like criminals, instead of with punishment.
  • Every case of addiction results from trauma.
  • The medical world does not understand emotional trauma.
  • ADHD is a response to trauma, it’s not genetic and it’s not a brain disease. It’s actually an adaptation to too much stress.
  • Children can feel the stress and suffering of their immediate environment. The strategies the children employ to deal with stress actually become problems later on.
  • A third of teenagers and adults in North America suffer from anxiety.
  • We pass on our trauma to our kids, not genetically but through our actions.
  • The addictive brain can be very clever when it comes to justifying your addictive actions.
  • You have two rational choices when dealing with an addict: you can choose to leave them or you can tell them you will be there to support them in their effort to escape their pain. The irrational choice is to try and change the person.
  • The addiction that manifested in you didn’t begin with you.
  • What is missing from your life and how did you lose it?
  • We should treat addicts with compassion and get to the core trauma instead of just treating the behavior.
  • Behavior problems become physiological problems in the brain based on the environment.
  • Trauma is a loss of self, recovery is getting it back.
  • When your recovery is complete, you will often have compassion towards the person that traumatized you in the knowledge that they were traumatized themselves in the same way.
  • Anger can be healthy, but it should be channeled in a useful way.
  • The more you stress people, the more you entrench them in their addictions.
  • We live in such a traumatized society, that traumatized people can rise to the top.
  • There are two kinds of trauma, overt and developmental. Not all trauma is from bad things that happened to you, it can also come from good things that didn’t happen to you.

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