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Gabor Mate Quotes

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.

Gabor Mate
Responsibility, Our World, Mind
Gabor Mate, M.D. (2009). “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”, p.396, Knopf Canada

Not why the addiction, but why the pain.

Gabor Mate
Pain, Recovery, Addiction

The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.

Gabor Mate
Hurt, Pain, Emotional

A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors. . . . The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain

Gabor Mate
Hurt, Stress, Addiction

It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.

Gabor Mate
Addiction, Drug, Relief
Gabor Mate, M.D. (2009). “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”, p.33, Knopf Canada

The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.

Gabor Mate
Passion, Flames, Differences

Medical thinking usually sees stress as highly disturbing but isolated events such as, for example, sudden unemployment, a marriage breakup, or the death of a loved one. These major events are potent sources of stress for many, but there are chronic daily stresses in people's lives that are more insidious and more harmful in their long-term biological consequences. Internally generated stresses take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary.

Gabor Mate
Breakup, Pain, Stress

In the real world there is no nature vs. nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment-by-moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects

Gabor Mate
Real, Environmental, World

Autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything.

Gabor Mate
Long, Impossible, Driven

A long-term substance abuser, a few months before his death, penned this poem: Went downtown, Hastings and Main, looking for relief from the pain. All I did was find a ticket on a one-way train. ... Give me peace before I die. The track is laid out so well; we all live our private hell; just more tickets on the hell-bound train.

Gabor Mate
Pain, Long, Track

... While nervous tension may be a component of stress, one can be stressed without feeling tension.

Gabor Mate
Pain, Stress, Feelings

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