Why Are Addictions So Powerful? by Dr. Gabor Maté

VIDEO – PASSION PLAY –

March 23, 2022 – From TEDx Talks: “As a medical doctor, I work in Vancouver, Canada, and I have worked with some very, very addicted people. People who use heroin, they inject cocaine, they drink alcohol, crystal meth and every drug known to man. And these people suffer . . . [and] lose everything. And yet, nothing shakes them from their addiction. Nothing can force them to give up their addiction. The addictions are powerful and the question is: why?

. . . if you want to understand addiction, you can’t look at what’s wrong with the addiction; you have to look at what’s right about it. In other words, what’s the person getting from the addiction? . . . What addicts get is relief from pain, what they get is a sense of peace, a sense of control, a sense of calmness, very, very temporarily.

And the question is why are these qualities missing from their lives, what happened to them? If you look at drugs like heroin, like morphine, like codeine, if you look at cocaine, if you look at alcohol, these are all painkillers. In one way or another, they all soothe pain. And that’s why the real question in addiction is not, ‘Why the addiction?,’ but, ‘Why the pain?’

. . .My definition of addiction is any behavior that gives you temporary relief, temporary pleasure, but in the long term causes harm, has some negative consequences and you can’t give it up, despite those negative consequences. And from that perspective, you can understand that there are many, many addictions. Yes, there is the addiction to drugs, but there is also the addiction to consumerism, there is the addiction to sex, to the internet, to shopping, to food.

The Buddhists have this idea of the hungry ghosts. The hungry ghosts are creatures with large empty bellies and small, scrawny necks and tiny little mouths, so they can never get enough, they can never fill this emptiness on the inside. And we are all hungry ghosts in this society, we all have this emptiness, and so many of us are trying to fill that emptiness from the outside and the addiction is all about trying to fill that emptiness from the outside.