“I am not afraid of dying, I am more afraid of living” patient of Gabor Maté in Vancouver.
‘The question we must ask is, ‘Why are people afraid of life?’ If you want to understand addiction, you cannot ask what is wrong with the addiction, you have to look at what is right about it. In other words, what is the person getting from the addiction, what are they getting that they don’t otherwise have?
And 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?’
Please check out Gabor Maté’s brilliant book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.
