👻#12: In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Maté - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

“The inhabitants of the Hungry Ghost Realm are depicted as creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs and large, bloated, empty bellies. this is the domain of addiction, where we constantly seek something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment.

The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need.

We don’t know what we need, and so long as we stay in the Hungry Ghost mode, we’ll never know. We haunt our lives without being fully present.” - Loc 373

“I’m not going to ask you what you were addicted to,” I often say to people. “Nor when, nor for how long. Only whatever your addictive focus; what did it offer you? What did you like about it? What, in the short term, did it give you that you craved or liked so much?”

And universally, the answers are: “It helped me escape emotional pain; helped me deal with stress; gave me peace of mind; a sense of connection with others, a sense of control.” - Loc 173

“The question is never why the addiction, but why the pain?” - Loc 181

“Addiction can take on many guises, from substances to seemingly “respectable” compulsions that all take a toll on human health and happiness. There are no good addictions. All addictions cause harm; any habit that does not cause harm is, by definition, not an addiction.” - Loc 282

“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 behaviour?

It’s possible to rule a passion, but an obsessive passion that a person is unable to rule is an addiction. And the addiction is the repeated behaviour that a person keeps engaging in, even though he knows it harms himself or others.

How it looks externally is irrelevant. The key issue is a person’s internal relationship to the passion and its related behaviours.” - Loc 2102

“Addiction is passion’s dark simulacrum and, to the naïve observer, its perfect mimic. It resembles passion in its urgency and in the promise of fulfillment, but its gifts are illusory. It’s a black hole. The more you offer it, the more it demands.” - Loc 2123

“I’ve heard some people shrug off their addictive tendencies by saying, “I can’t be an alcoholic. I don’t drink that much…” or “I only drink at certain times.”

The issue is not the quantity or even the frequency, but the impact.

An addict continues to use a drug when evidence strongly demonstrates the drug is doing significant harm. If users show the pattern of preoccupation and compulsive use repeatedly over time with relapse, addiction can be identified.” - Loc 2362

“Heroin is considered to be a highly addictive drug—and it is, but only for a small minority of people, as the following example illustrates. It’s well known that many American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s were regular users.

20% of the returning enlisted men met the criteria for the diagnosis of addiction while they were in Southeast Asia, whereas before they were shipped overseas fewer than 1% had been addicts.

The researchers were astonished to find that “after Vietnam, use of particular drugs and combinations of drugs decreased to near or even below pre service levels.” The remission rate was 95 per cent. These results suggested that the addiction did not arise from the heroin itself but from the needs of the men who used the drug. Otherwise, most of them would have remained addicts.” - Loc 2452

“Compulsive gambling, for example, is widely considered to be a form of addiction without anyone arguing that it’s caused by a deck of cards.” - Loc 2426

“Addiction is a human problem that resides in people, not in the drug or in the drug’s capacity to produce physical effects.” - Loc 2451

“Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anaesthetics.” - Loc 866

“When people speak of feeling “hurt” or of having emotional “pain”, they are not being abstract or poetic but scientifically quite precise.” - Loc 870

“I was fifteen years old when I came down here to Hastings,” Serena says. “I had five hundred dollars in my pocket I’d saved for food until I caught up with my mom. It took me a week to find her. I had about four hundred bucks left. When she found that out, she stuck a needle in my arm. The four hundred dollars was gone in four hours.”

“And that was your first experience with heroin?”

“Yes.” A long silence ensues, broken only by the throaty, weeping sounds Serena is trying to suppress. “And then she sold me to a fucking big fat huge motherfucker while I was sleeping.” These words are uttered with the helpless, plaintive rage of a child.”

“I was molested by my uncle and my grandfather, and the drugs keep me from thinking about what happened.”

The sexual abuse began when Serena was seven years old and persisted until she gave birth to her child, at fifteen. All the while, she was looking after her younger siblings.

“I had to protect my brother and sister, too. I’d hide them in the basement with four or five bottles of baby food. They were still in diapers. When I was eleven years old, I tried to refuse my grandfather, but he said that if I didn’t do exactly what he told me, he was going to do it to Caleb, too. Caleb was only eight then.”

“And your grandmother didn’t protect you?”

“She couldn’t. She was drinking so much. She began drinking every morning. She was drinking until my daughter was born.” - Loc 1209

“The less effective our own internal chemical happiness system is, the more driven we are to seek joy or relief through drug taking or other compulsions.” - Loc 2826

“Children who have not received the attentive presence of the parent are, as we will see, at greater risk for seeking chemical satisfaction from external sources later in life.” - Loc 2810

“Parent-blaming is emotionally unkind and scientifically incorrect. All parents do their best; only our best is limited by our own unresolved or unconscious trauma.” - Loc 348

“Attunement is, literally, being “in tune” with someone else’s emotional states. It’s not a question of parental love but of the parent’s ability to be present emotionally in such a way that the infant or child feels understood, accepted and mirrored. Attunement is the real language of love, the conduit by which a pre-verbal child can realize that she is loved. 

Attunement is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive and is easily subverted when the parent is stressed, depressed or distracted. A parent can be fully attached to the infant—fully “in love”—but not attuned. For example, the infants of depressed parents experience physiological stress not because they are not loved, but because their parents are not attuned with them—and attunement is especially likely to be lacking if parents missed out on it in their own childhoods.

Children in poorly attuned relationships may feel loved, or be aware that love is there, but on a deeper and essential level they do not experience themselves as seen or appreciated for who they really are.” - Loc 3917

“To expect an addict to give up her drug is like asking the average person to imagine living without all her social skills, support networks, emotional stability and sense of physical and psychological comfort.

Thus for all the valid reasons we have for wanting the addict to “just say no”, we first need to offer her something to which she can say “yes.”

We must provide an island of relief.” - Loc 5162

“A positive and even joyful choice for something else that has greater value for you,

or

forcing yourself to stay away from something you crave.” - Loc 6062

“For me personally, sobriety means being free of internal compulsion and living according to principles I believe in. Unlike abstinence, I don’t experience it as a constraint but as liberation.” - Loc 6076

“In choosing sobriety we’re not so much avoiding something harmful as envisioning ourselves living the life we value. What sobriety looks like will vary from person to person, but in all cases it has the individual, rather than the addictive compulsion, in the lead.” - Loc 6083

“Anyone who has successfully achieved sobriety knows that no evanescent pleasure can be compared with the peace that comes from living in integrity. Many people think of commitment as a limitation of possibilities. Rather than a limitation, it is a source of joy.” - Loc 6183

✍️ Step 1: Re-label

Label the addictive thought or urge exactly for what it is, not mistaking it for reality. When we re-label, we give up the language of need. I say to myself: “I don’t need to purchase anything now or to eat anything now; I’m only having an obsessive thought that I have such a need. It’s not a real, objective need but a false belief. I may have a feeling of urgency, but there is actually nothing urgent going on.”

🧠 Step 2: Re-attribute

Learn that this is my brain sending me a false message. This step is designed to assign the re-labelled addictive urge to its proper source. State very clearly where that urge originated: in neurological circuits that were programmed into your brain long ago, when you were a child. It represents a dopamine or endorphin “hunger” on the part of brain systems that, early in your life, lacked the necessary conditions for their full development. It also represents emotional needs that went unsatisfied.

🎾 Step 3: Re-focus

Buy yourself time. Although the compulsion to open the bag of cookies or turn on the TV or drive to the store or the casino is powerful, its shelf life is not permanent. Being a mind-phantom, it will pass, and you have to give it time to pass. Your initial goal is modest: buy yourself just fifteen minutes. Choose something that you enjoy and that will keep you active: preferably something healthy and creative, but anything that will please you without causing greater harm.

🏆 Step 4: Re-value

In the Re-value step you de-value the false gold. You assign to it its proper worth: less than nothing. What has this addictive urge done for me? You will ask. It has caused me to spend money heedlessly or to stuff myself when I wasn’t hungry or to be absent from the ones I love or to expend my energies on activities I later regretted. It has wasted my time. It has led me to lie and to cheat and to pretend—first to myself and then to everyone close to me. It has left me feeling ashamed and isolated. It promised joy and delivered bitterness. The real “value” of my addictive compulsion has been that it has caused me to betray my true values and disregard my true goals.

🐣 Step 5: Re-create [Bonus Step!]

It is time to re-create: to choose a different life. You have values. You have passions. You have intention, talent, capability. In your heart there is love, and you want to connect that with the love in the world, in the universe. As you re-label, re-attribute, re-focus and re-value, you are releasing patterns that have held you and that you have held on to. In place of a life blighted by your addictive need for acquisition, self-soothing, admiration, oblivion, meaningless activity, what is the life you really want? What do you choose to create? - Loc 6025