Gabor Matรฉ - "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts"
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| Photo credit: Trip Fontaine/ Book cover / edit by Emanuela |
Do you remember our post from last March 20th? It was about Brian's interview with the Guardian "On my radar: Brian Molko's cultural highlights". Brian talked about what impressed him the most in different cultural fields: his fave book, album, TV series, film and exhibition.
As we already know, Brian's remarks are never obvious, and his suggestions aroused a certain interest and curiosity among us. Our dear Olga has already spoken to us in detail about the TV series "Preacher" and the film "Children of Men" in recent days.
So today I'm going to talk about the book Brian brought to our attention: "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" by Gabor Matรฉ.
I too am reading it and I must say it's a truly enlightening book, a must-read that will change how you see yourself, others and the world. The author proposes an empathetic, non-guilt-ridden approach to addiction and points out that the remedies put in place by institutions are not actually effective solutions. The assumption is that addiction is not the problem, but the consequence of painful situations, or even trauma, that lead to it.
I could really talk for hours about this book and its author, but I'll leave you to read about who Gabor Matรฉ is and some of his most significant statements on the subject.
One last thing that opened my eyes and made me think a lot: addictions do not affect just alcoholics, drug addicts or gambling addicts, they affect almost all human beings in countless areas.
In the author's own words: “If I was in a room with participants and I would ask people to raise their hands if they recognize some addictive pattern in their life in our society, 90% of people will put their hand up, and they usually do, and the other 10%...most of them are lying to themselves or they don't know themselves well enough”.
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| Book cover |
Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944, he is a survivor of the Nazi genocide. His maternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz when he was five months old, his aunt disappeared during the war, and his father endured forced labour at the hands of the Nazis.
He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1957. After graduating with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a few years as a high school English and literature teacher, he returned to school to pursue his childhood dream of being a physician.
Dr Gabor Matรฉ specializes in the study and treatment of addiction, childhood development, trauma and the relationship of stress and illness. He is also widely recognized for his unique perspective on Attention Deficit Disorder and his firmly held belief in the connection between mind and body health.
Matรฉ ran a private family practice in East Vancouver for over twenty years. He was also the medical co-ordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital for seven years. He is also the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for the people of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Many of his patients suffer from mental illness, drug addiction and HIV, or all three.
His books include "Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder", "When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress”, "Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers” and about his experiences working with addicts in “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”.
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| Dr Gabor Matรฉ. Photo credit unknown |
In this award-winning modern classic, Gabor Matรฉ takes a holistic and compassionate approach to addiction, whether to alcohol, drugs, sex, money or anything self-destructive. He presents it not as a discrete phenomenon confined to a weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs through (and even underpins) our society; not as a medical ‘condition’, but rather the result of a complex interplay of personal history, emotional development and brain chemistry.
In fact, the formidable 400-plus pages here do not offer even one recovery story. At the Portland, says Matรฉ, “there is no chimera of redemption nor any expectation of socially acceptable outcomes, only an unsentimental recognition of the real needs of real human beings in the dingy present, based on a uniformly tragic past.” (…)
His analysis of the biology of addiction shatters the widespread notion that drugs themselves cause dependency, and he is virulent in his attack on the impotent “war on drugs” waged here and south of the border. Most compellingly, he demonstrates how addiction fills the void created by emotional trauma by mimicking the positive brain chemicals that most of us experience over the course of a normal, loving childhood.
Matรฉ frequently turns the lens on himself, admitting to being a workaholic, being ruled by his ego, and sometimes feeling contempt for the people he treats. He also has an addiction – not to drugs, but to out-of-control spending on classical music. (He once left a patient in the final throes of childbirth to satisfy the compulsion.) Matรฉ’s “confession” sets up an interesting meta-narrative that will make readers wonder if they, too, are being manipulated.
๐ธBRIAN ABOUT THE BOOK:
This is a really important book about addiction. Modern addiction treatment hasn’t really evolved much in the past 50 to 100 years – it’s pretty much a one-size-fits-all approach, from my experience – but this book feels like a real gamechanger. Dr Gabor Matรฉ believes that most addiction is the result of unresolved and unprocessed trauma, usually from childhood, which continues to play out in our daily lives. So the question he feels we should be asking is not why the addiction; rather, why the pain? Because that’s basically what most addiction is about: it’s about feelings, and creating coping mechanisms to anaesthetise these feelings.
(The Guardian - On my radar, Culture, March 19th, 2022)
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| Photo credit: Joseph Llanes |
“There's a common myth that addiction has to do with drugs, and of course it does, but not only with drugs.
An addiction, the source of the word itself is a latin word for kind of slavery, so an addiction is any behavior that we're slave to.
By the way...right away obvious the question is: is this a good addiction?
It's like asking: is there such thing as good slavery? No there isn't.
An addiction, by my definition, it's a complex process but it's manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in, and therefore craves suffers negative consequences as a result of, but doesn't give it up or refuses to or cannot despite negative consequences. So the hallmarks of addiction are craving pleasure relief short term, long term harm, inability to give it up. That's what an addiction is.
That definition says nothing about drugs. It includes any human behavior that is characterized by those features that could be eating, shopping, gambling, self-harm bulimia, work extreme, poor sports, pornography, sexual addiction, internet gaming, the internet itself. In other words: anything”.
If you want to listen to the whole interview (it's really worth it):
๐ https://bit.ly/3K4eHMw
๐ธADDICTION, NOT PASSION
“If there's no negative harm, if there's no negative consequence, if there's no harm, it's not addiction, it's a passion. The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates Passion creates, addiction consumes.”
Gabor Matรฉ
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| Photo credit: Daniele Barraco |
“No human being is ever beyond redemption. The possibility of renewal exists so long as life exists. How to support that possibility in others and in ourselves is the ultimate question”.
“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge”.
“From the Latin word vulnerare, “to wound,” vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defense mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic”.
“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side”.
“The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit. ...The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue. The prejudice is evident in the contradiction that some harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco) are legal while others, less harmful in some ways, are contraband. This has less to do with the innate danger of the drugs than with which populations are publicly identified with using the drugs. The white and wealthier the population, the more acceptable is the substance. And profit. If you have fear, prejudice, and ignorance, there will be profit”.
“And here is where I’m humbled. I’m humbled by my feebleness in helping this person. Humbled that I had the arrogance to believe I’d seen and heard it all. You can never see and hear it all because, for all their sordid similarities, each story in the Downtown Eastside unfolded in the particular existence of a unique human being. Each one needs to be heard, witnessed, and acknowledged anew, every time it’s told. (…)
Spiritual teachings of all traditions enjoin us to see the divine in each other. Namaste, the Sanskrit holy greeting, means, “The divine in me salutes the divine in you.” The divine? It’s so hard for us even to see the human”.
Post by Emanuela
