How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction – Gabor Maté

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So an addiction is a complex  psychological physiological process   but which manifests in any behavior any behavior  that a person enjoys that a person enjoys   finds relief in and therefore craves in the short  term but suffers negative consequences in the long  
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term and doesn’t give up despite the negative  consequences. So craving pleasure relief in   the short term negative consequences in the long  term inability to give it up. Now notice I said   nothing about substances. I said any behavior so  it could be related to cocaine crystal meth heroin  
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fentanyl marijuana nicotine alcohol whatever  could also be sex gambling internet relationships   shopping eating work extreme sports working out  pornography any number of human activities so   i said any behavior now the official definition  of addiction according the american society for  
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addiction medicine is that this is primary uh it’s  a primary brain disorder it arises in the brain   largely due to genetic reasons this is how they  see it and i say that’s just not true the other   popular idea about addiction is that it’s a  choice that somebody makes that people choose  
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to be addicted which is what the legal system is  based on because if people are not choosing what   are we punishing them for and and although i think  the medical definition is closer to the truth   i don’t see it as genetic it’s a genetic  disorder and i don’t see it as a primary  
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brain disorder so let me perhaps show  you why if that’s okay a human being has   two fundamental needs apart from the  physical needs in infancy in childhood   one is for attachment now attachment is the  closeness and proximity with another human being  
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for the sake of being looked after or  for the sake of looking after the other   human beings as mammals and even birds are  creatures of attachment we have to connect   and attach because otherwise we don’t survive if  there’s nobody that’s motivated to take care of us  
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to attach to us that way and if not motivated  to attach to others we just can’t survive one of these things is that the endorphins  which um the embodies internal opiate chemicals   which heroin and all the other opiates  resemble they have to facilitate attachment  
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so if you take infant mice and you knock out  their endorphin receptors so they don’t have   endorphin opiate activity in  their brain they won’t cry for   help and separate from their mothers which  wouldn’t mean that they would die in the wild  
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and which goes back to what happens in early  in childhood when their stress and trauma   these these endorphin systems don’t develop and  then when people do heroin it feels like a warm   soft hug to them they feel love and connection  for the first time that’s why it’s so powerful
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but so we have this need for attachment we  thought which obviously the hearing infant   was the most hopeless the most dependent the least  mature of any creature in the universe at birth   uh cannot survive without the attachment and that  attachment relationship given that we have the  
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longest period of development of any creature  you know well into adolescence and and beyond attachment is not a negotiable need but we have another need which is authenticity  now authenticity auto self means being connected  
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to ourselves just knowing what we feel and being  able to act on it so that means our gut feelings   so let’s look at how human beings evolved for  hundreds of thousands of years and for a hundred   thousand years or so of this species existing on  earth how did we live we didn’t live in cities and  
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houses and so on we lived there out there in the  wild until very recently in human um existence now   just how long do you survive in the wild if you’re  not connected to your gut feelings not very long   if you start using your intellect instead  of your gut feelings you just don’t survive
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so that’s a powerful survival need as  well so attachment is a survival need   authenticity is a survival need but what happens  if your authenticity threatens your attachment   relationships for example as a two-year-old  you get angry because you can get that cookie  
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before dinner but your parents can’t handle anger  because they grew up in homes when there was rage   aholism and they’re terrified that they’re very  expression of anger so they give you the message   that good little kids don’t get angry the  message you receive is not that good little  
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kids don’t get angry but that angry little  kids don’t get loved because your parents   are now sullen they won’t look at you they talk  to you in a harsh way you’re not getting loved   not experiencing love at that moment  no but you got to stay attached  
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guess what you’re going to suppress  the authenticity every time   and this is how we lose connection to ourselves  and to our gut feelings so that strangely enough   that very dynamic which is essential for human  survival in a natural setting not becomes a threat  
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to our survival in his in this more modern setting  where to stay authentic is to threaten attachment   and so we give up our authenticity and then we  wonder who the hell we are and whose life is this   and who’s experiencing all this and this life  doesn’t you know and who am i really and so  
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that’s where the reconnection has to happen that’s  what the healing happens is with that reconnection   but it’s because of that conflict the tragic  conflict in childhood between authenticity   and attachment that most of us face that we lose  ourselves and lose connection to our gut feelings  
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now this leads to the the question of trauma  because it’s one thing to recognize that all this   originates in childhood pain it’s quite another  to transform that pain and for that we have to   understand what trauma is so people often think  that trauma is what happens to you so trauma is  
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a divorce when you’re small and your parents  fighting trauma is your mother’s depression   trauma is your father’s alcoholism trauma is your  parents argumentation trauma is physical or sexual   abuse or some loss those aren’t the traumas those  are traumatic but the trauma is not what happens  
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to you the traumas of what happens inside you and  as a result of these traumatic events what happens   inside you is you get you get disconnected from  your emotions and you disconnect it from your body   and you have difficulty being in the present  moment and you develop a negative view of your  
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world and a negative view of yourself  and a defensive view of other people   and these perspectives keep showing up in  your life in the present so in other words   the addiction is not the primary problem it’s  an attempt to solve a problem and then the real  
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question is how did the problem arise in other  words this is where my theory is that it’s   always rooted in childhood trauma and that the  addiction is an attempt to deal with the effects   of childhood trauma which it does temporarily  while it creates even more problems in the long  
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term and so the issue is not just to recognize  what happened 10 15 30 however many years ago   but to actually recognize their manifestations  in the present moment and to transcend them and   already do that by reconnecting with yourself by  restoring the connection with your body primarily  
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and with your emotions that you lost and once  you do when you found these things again then   you have what we call recovery because  what does it mean to recover something   it means to find it again so what does  the people find when they recover they  
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find themselves and the loss of self is the  essence of trauma so the real purpose of of   addiction treatment mental health treatment  any kind of healing is reconnection you