How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction – Gabor Maté

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  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 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  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  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  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  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  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  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  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 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  longest period of development of any creature you know well into adolescence and beyond attachment is not a negotiable need but we have another need which is authenticity now authenticity auto self means being connected  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  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 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  before dinner but your parents can’t handle anger because they grew up in homes when there was rage  a holism 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  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  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  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  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  now this leads to 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  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  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  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.

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  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.

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  find themselves and the loss of self is the essence of trauma so the real purpose of  addiction treatment mental health treatment any kind of healing is reconnection you.

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