A Candid Conversation on Addiction Featuring Dr. Gabor Maté and Joe Polish - Genius Network Episode #159

It's very simple. I mean, if you look at your own addictions, those of you and most of you raised your hand and when you gave it up for a while and then you relapsed, what usually happened that caused a relapse? Usually something stressful happened. So it was your way of dealing with stress. So it follows that the more you stress people, the more you entrench them in their addictions. So create a system that ostracizes and punishes and torments people and exiles them from society. You just making sure that they're going to stay addicted.

Joe interviewed Dr. Gabor Mate for an hour on addiction. They also discussed emotional pain, distress and anxiety. Here are some of the insights they shared. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www. Geniusnetwork.

Can I make something clear right away?

Yes.

I just need to correct a couple of things. I didn't specialize in neurology and psychology and psychiatry. I, I was a family physician, worked in addictions and all kinds of other fields.

Well, first off, it's. It's great to have you here. This is the first time I've ever brought someone like you and talk about this subject at a business conference like this. And the reason I, I did it is because some people may not see the relevancy, but I want us to be able to, to describe to them what it is.

Let's show them the relevancy.

Okay. What is addiction?

Let's define it. So addiction is complex, but it's manifested in any behavior, any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long term and can't give up. Now, notice any behavior. I didn't say drugs. Most of the time we think about addiction, we think of substances. And that certainly is one important target of addictive behavior. But I said any behavior that could be gambling, could be sex, could be relationships, could be Internet, could be Facebook shopping, as in my case, could be eating, could be work. Now let me ask you this question. What did you like about it? What did it do for you? What did it give you in the short term? So who would tell me? Relief from pain. Thank you. Anybody else?

Control.

Control. Relief from pain. Gave you control. What else? Love. Somebody said escape from anxiety. Thank you. What else? It dealt with loneliness. Okay, let's look at these things now. Escape from pain. Pain. Relief. Sense of control. Relief from loneliness. What else did people say?

Anxiety.

Relief from anxiety. In other words, inner peace. So right away, when you understand that, you get that the addiction wasn't your problem. Your addiction was your attempt to solve a problem. And the real question is, how did that problem develop? How come it's 7 billion humans in the world? You felt lonely? How come you lacked a sense of agency, control, authority in your life? Why were you in so much emotional pain and everything you said, the loneliness, the lack of power, the lack of control, the anxiety, these are forms of emotional pain. So my mantra on addiction is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And this is where we can talk more about it. But as you and I both know, the current model of addiction is either the legal one, which says it's a choice that people make and therefore we have to punish them for it, or it's a medical one, in which case it's an inherited brain disease. But it isn't either of those things. Where it actually is, is an attempt to solve a human life problem, that of emotional pain, loneliness, distress, anxiety, whatever it is. And the real question then is, what happened in my life or your life, Joe, or everybody else's lives here, that we incurred pain, and then how do we deal with our pain? Because the addiction itself magnifies the pain. It multiplies, increases it exponentially. So it begins in pain. As Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, says, addictions begin in pain and they end in pain. Both my addictions, the work was very respectable. It got me nothing but praise and income. And it created deep problems in my family, you know. And then my shopping addiction, well, he's a lover of classical music. Isn't that wonderful? You know? But some of the respectable addictions, and I say this somewhat hesitatingly, but I'll say it anyway, in front of a business audience, have to do with profit and power. Where for some people, nothing is ever enough. And it's not because they're bad people, but because they're trying to stuff a hole inside themselves. And then that can cause serious damage in the world.

Several years ago is the first time I started talking about being a drug addict.

And what was that in your case? Cocaine Was.

It was cocaine. Yeah. Well, I mean, heck, when I was between the ages of 16, 18, it started with. I would get high every day and smoke pot. I would take pills, speed. I would snort crystal meth. I would snort cocaine. And there was one day, I remember where I. One day I was freebasing. I was on lsd, I was smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, taking mushrooms and snorting crystal Meth all in one day. But the core addiction was a sexual addiction because I was molested as a kid. My mother died when I was 4. I was molested as a kid. I was paid money not to say anything between the ages of 8 to 10. And it wired in my head that sex is not an intimate act of love and oneness.

So one of my addictions has been to work. In fact, that's a continued challenge for me. So I got a certain message from the world. I was born in Budapest, Hungary, 1944. Jewish parents, two months before the Nazis occupied Hungary. The message I got from the world is that the world didn't want me. Not because Hitler didn't want me, because I didn't know Hitler. But my mother was unhappy. And children are narcissists in the developmental sense. They take everything personally. So when the bad things are happening, it must be about me. And if she's not happy around me, Thich Nhat Hanh, the spiritual teacher, says that the greatest gift parents can give their children is their own happiness, because the children take that personally. So when my mother is unhappy and depressed and in terror, I get the message the world doesn't want me. And then at one year of age, she gives me to a stranger to save my life. So I don't see her for a month. I get the message the world doesn't want me. 30 odd years later, I become a physician. But one way to deal with not being wanted is to become a doctor. They're going to want you all the time. They're going to want you when they're being born, they want you when they're dying. And they're going to want you at every moment in between. And the beeper is always going. This is before cell phones, of course, and the beeper is always going. And you're getting validation every moment. And what it is is a compensation for the sense of not being wanted that I've never dealt with. Now, in your case, you got a message as well that you're wanted through your body, you're wanted through your body, you're wanted. When you're sexually available, that's the message you get. What are you going to do? So especially if you look at men who are sex addicts and women who are sex addicts, what it really is is women, or sometimes men, who've learned that only through their bodies and only through the sexual act are they actually wanted. Well, that's really addictive because we all need to be wanted. And so I think that's also what's behind it?

Absolutely. So many people struggle with this. And that's why I've now wanted to use the platform that I have in business to go out and try to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment. And right now, the criminal justice system is treating addicts when it needs, needs to be something else.

Well, if you look at the criminal justice system, it's really based on this idea that, as I said earlier, that addiction is a choice that somebody makes. If somebody's not making a conscious choice, what are they doing punishing them? You don't punish people because they're suffering and they're trying to escape from their pain. You help them.

You cannot punish pain out of people in the criminal justice system. And you said in one of your talks that if you wanted to create the perfect system that would keep people addicted, you would create the exact prison system that we have in the United States. And it's true.

It's very simple. I mean, if you look at your own addictions, those of you and most of you raised your hand and when you gave it up for a while and then you relapsed, what usually happened that caused the relapse? Usually something stressful happened. What I'm saying with addiction, in short, is that every case of addiction originates in trauma. The medical world utterly misunderstands the problem and don't get any training in understanding human psychology. And the same thing is true of many of the programs where people go for addiction. So they never deal with the core issue. They only deal with the behavior of addiction. But the behavior is only a symptom.

And you talk about in your book Scattered, that ADD is a response to trauma.

Yes, it is.

What does that mean?

Well, first of all, let me make a point that occurred to me when you were talking about your marijuana use and your cocaine use. Those are typical self medications for ADD because the marijuana calms down the hyperactive mind. And if you get treated for add, what do they give you? They give you a stimulant which elevates dopamine levels in the brain. What do you think cocaine is? It's a stimulant. It elevates dopamine levels. So the point I'm making is that a lot of addictions are actually self medications for specific conditions. Like in your case, when you look at the tuning out, the absentmindedness of add, why do we have that capacity to tune out? Do you think nature gives us that capacity? We all have that capacity to Dissociate, to tune out. So let's say, what do I do then when my mother is depressed and stressed and terrorized? How do I deal with it? Can I fight back, escape and ask for help? From whom? I tune out. But then the tuning out becomes programmed into my brain. And then 55 years later or 50 years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD. Odd. What's going on? What's going on is that the parenting environment has become increasingly stressed for all kinds of reasons. And when the parenting environment is stressed, the kids are stressed. And how do they cope with it? They tune out. When the brains are developing, what's happening is that the conditions in which children are growing up is getting more and more stressful. And that has to do with the stress on the parents. And that also has to do, of course, with the workaholism of the parents. Like in my case, you know, the world thought I was great. I was out there delivering babies and helping the dying, palliative care and everything else in between. But what of me did my children receive? Not very much, because I was always trying to validate myself out there in the world. So then I pass on my trauma to them, but I pass it on, not genetically, but through the conditions that obtained in my home. And my kids were small.

How do you interact with someone that's caused so much grief in your life? I mean, in my worst stages of addict, I was a pain in the ass. How does one hold compassion when there's a family member, a husband, a wife, a child, you know, friends that are just causing so much trouble?

So what do I say to families? One is, you have a decision to make. The rational choice is, number one, what you're doing causes me so much pain, so much stress, I can't be with it. I love you very much, but this is too hard on me. And I'm not willing to expend my energies trying to self care for all the stress that's been caused for me by your behavior. So I can't be with you. That's a perfectly rational choice. Or you can say, I love you very much. And I understand that what you're doing, whatever it is, comes out of your pain. And this is the only way so far you've found to deal with your pain. So I'm not going to judge you, I'm not going to cajole you, I'm not going to try and change you. I just hope you come to your senses at some point. But I'll be with you and I'll be supporting you emotionally and so on. That's another rational choice. What is completely irrational and dysfunctional is to stay with somebody and try and change them, to cajole them, to convince them, to bribe them, to beg them, to. To coerce them to change. That's what's crazy making. Don't ever do that. It's one or the other. That's the first thing. The second thing is, given my understanding of addiction, that it isn't an individual brain disease, but actually is a function of a child's experience, a person's experience in a family environment and particularly in a multi generational family environment where trauma is passed on from one generation to the next unwittingly. But it is. I did not mean to traumatize my kids, but I did and parents do. Then we recognize that the addiction that's manifested in you didn't begin with you. It's actually an expression of multi generational family dynamics. And so what it actually is is that recognition allows for an opportunity. Now let's all heal together. So that you say to the addict, thank you for being the sensitive one who's manifested for all of us what's been hidden in the family. And then we haven't known how to deal with or haven't even realized it was there. And so now it's time to heal the whole family system. And we invite you to join us if you're ready. And if you're not ready, we're still going to carry on that path of healing for the family because it's so important. But we're not going to judge you whether you join us, whether you don't. So that's what I would say to families.

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