Khushi Saini > Khushi's Quotes

“Consummatory behaviour—from the Latin consummare, “to complete”—is behaviour that removes the danger or relieves the tension caused by it. We recall that stress-inducing stimuli are not always objective external threats like predators or potential physical disasters but also include internal perceptions that something we consider essential is lacking. This is why lack of control, lack of information—and, as we will see, unsatisfied emotional needs (e.g., lack of love), trigger the HPA axis. Consummation of such needs abolishes the stress response.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No

“Developmental psychologists agree that praising a child’s effort is helpful and promotes self-esteem, while valuing the achievement only programs kids to keep seeking external approval—not for who they are but for what they do, for what others demand of them. It’s yet another barrier to the emergence of a healthy self.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Put another way, the world we believe in becomes the world we live in. If I see the world as a hostile place where only winners thrive, I may well become aggressive, selfish, and grandiose to survive in such a milieu. Later in life I will gravitate to competitive environments and endeavors that can only confirm that view and reinforce its validity. Our beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“We are born not knowing who we are, we don't know how to think. We only know how to feel. It is through our feelings that how we are raised creates the trajectory for out future lives. - Natasha Khazanov”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Our failure to keep our children attached to us and to the other adults responsible for them has not only taken away their shields but put a sword in the hands of their peers. When peers replace parents, children lose their vital protection against the thoughtlessness of others. The vulnerability of a child in such circumstances can easily be overwhelmed. The resulting pain is more than many children can bear. Studies have been unequivocal in their findings that the best protection for a child, even through adolescence, is a strong attachment with an adult.

The most impressive of these studies involved ninety thousand adolescents from eighty different communities chosen to make the sample as representative of the United States as possible. The primary finding was that teenagers with strong emotional ties to their parents were much less likely to exhibit drug and alcohol problems, attempt suicide, or engage in violent behavior and early sexual activity. Such adolescents, in other words, were at greatly reduced risk for the problems that stem from being defended against vulnerability. Shielding them from stress and protecting their emotional health and functioning were strong attachments with their parents.

This was also the conclusion of the noted American psychologist Julius Segal, a brilliant pioneer of research into what makes young people resilient. Summarizing studies from around the world, he concluded that the most important factor keeping children from being overwhelmed by stress was “the presence in their lives of a charismatic adult — a person with whom they identify and from whom they gather strength.” As Dr. Segal has also said, “Nothing will work in the absence of an indestructible link of caring between parent and child.”

Peers should never have come to matter that much — certainly not more than parents or teachers or other adult attachment figures. Taunts and rejection by peers sting, of course, but they shouldn't cut to the quick, should not be so devastating. The profound dejection of an excluded child reveals a much more serious attachment problem than it does a peer-rejection problem.”
― Gabor Maté, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except,”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“All the substances that are the main drugs of abuse today originate in natural plant products and have been known to human beings for thousands of years. Opium, the basis of heroin, is an extract of the Asian poppy Papaver somniferum. Four thousand years ago, the Sumerians and Egyptians were already familiar with its usefulness in treating pain and diarrhea and also with its powers to affect a person’s psychological state.

Cocaine is an extract of the leaves of Erythroxyolon coca, a small tree that thrives on the eastern slopes of the Andes in western South America. Amazon Indians chewed coca long before the Conquest, as an antidote to fatigue and to reduce the need to eat on long, arduous mountain journeys. Coca was also venerated in spiritual practices: Native people called it the Divine Plant of the Incas. In what was probably the first ideological “War on Drugs” in the New World, the Spanish invaders denounced coca’s effects as a “delusion from the devil.”

The hemp plant, from which marijuana is derived, first grew on the Indian subcontinent and was christened Cannabis sativa by the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in 1753. It was also known to ancient Persians, Arabs and Chinese, and its earliest recorded pharmaceutical use appears in a Chinese compendium of medicine written nearly three thousand years ago. Stimulants derived from plants were also used by the ancient Chinese, for example in the treatment of nasal and bronchial congestion.

Alcohol, produced by fermentation that depends on microscopic fungi, is such an indelible part of human history and joy making that in many traditions it is honoured as a gift from the gods. Contrary to its present reputation, it has also been viewed as a giver of wisdom. The Greek historian Herodotus tells of a tribe in the Near East whose council of elders would never sustain a decision they made when sober unless they also confirmed it under the influence of strong wine. Or, if they came up with something while intoxicated, they would also have to agree with themselves after sobering up.

None of these substances could affect us unless they worked on natural processes in the human brain and made use of the brain’s innate chemical apparatus. Drugs influence and alter how we act and feel because they resemble the brain’s own natural chemicals. This likeness allows them to occupy receptor sites on our cells and interact with the brain’s intrinsic messenger systems. But why is the human brain so receptive to drugs of abuse?

Nature couldn’t have taken millions of years to develop the incredibly intricate system of brain circuits, neurotransmitters and receptors that become involved in addiction just so people could get “high” to escape their troubles or have a wild time on a Saturday night. These circuits and systems, writes a leading neuroscientist and addiction researcher, Professor Jaak Panksepp, must “serve some critical purpose other than promoting the vigorous intake of highly purified chemical compounds recently developed by humans.” Addiction may not be a natural state, but the brain regions it subverts are part of our central machinery of survival.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“to make peace with our inner tormentors, we have to first understand them against the backdrop of their origin stories. This is the compassion of context.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Are you craving and partaking of something that affords you temporary relief or pleasure, inviting or incurring negative consequences but not giving it up? Welcome to the meeting. Free coffee in the back.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“The “immaterial” mind and its “physical substrate,” the brain and body, are in a constant dance, as intimate as it is intricate.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“The risk of lung cancer, Kissen found, was five times higher in men who lacked the ability to express emotion effectively.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

“The key to the transformational potential of bare attention lies in the deceptively simple injunction to separate out one’s reactions from the core events themselves,” writes psychiatrist and Buddhist meditation teacher Mark Epstein. Much”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“The successes (financial) represent addictive drives, whose negative impact in the world is tremendous. Who creates more suffering, somebody who sells an ounce of heroin to somebody else to feed their own habit or somebody who destroys the Amazon forest for some financial gain? Which addict causes more problems in the world?”
― Gabor Maté

“What, then, is addiction? In the words of a consensus statement by addiction experts in 2001, addiction is a “chronic neurobiological disease… characterized by behaviors that include one or more of the following: impaired control over drug use, compulsive use, continued use despite harm, and craving.” The key features of substance addiction are the use of drugs or alcohol despite negative consequences, and relapse. I’ve heard some people shrug off their addictive tendencies by saying, for example, “I can’t be an alcoholic. I don’t drink that much…” or “I only drink at certain times.” The issue is not the quantity or even the frequency, but the impact.

“An addict continues to use a drug when evidence strongly demonstrates the drug is doing significant harm…. If users show the pattern of preoccupation and compulsive use repeatedly over time with relapse, addiction can be identified.” Helpful as such definitions are, we have to take a broader view to understand addiction fully. There is a fundamental addiction process that can express itself in many ways, through many different habits. The use of substances like heroin, cocaine, nicotine and alcohol are only the most obvious examples, the most laden with the risk of physiological and medical consequences.

Many behavioural, nonsubstance addictions can also be highly destructive to physical health, psychological balance, and personal and social relationships. Addiction is any repeated behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. Addiction involves: 1. compulsive engagement with the behaviour, a preoccupation with it; 2.
impaired control over the behaviour; 3. persistence or relapse, despite evidence of harm; and 4. dissatisfaction, irritability or intense craving when the object — be it a drug, activity or other goal — is not immediately available. Compulsion, impaired control, persistence, irritability, relapse and craving — these are the hallmarks of addiction — any addiction.

Not all harmful compulsions are addictions, though: an obsessive-compulsive, for example, also has impaired control and persists in a ritualized and psychologically debilitating behaviour such as, say, repeated hand washing. The difference is that he has no craving for it and, unlike the addict, he gets no kick out of his compulsion. How does the addict know she has impaired control? Because she doesn’t stop the behaviour in spite of its ill effects. She makes promises to herself or others to quit, but despite pain, peril and promises, she keeps relapsing. There are exceptions, of course. Some addicts never recognize the harm their behaviours cause and never form resolutions to end them. They stay in denial and rationalization. Others openly accept the risk, resolving to live and die “my way.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“As with drug addicts, addictive eaters have diminished dopamine receptors; in one study, the more obese the subjects were, the fewer dopamine receptors they had.10”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No

“what an adult unconsciously reveals about his own childhood during the course of the attachment interview will predict his own attachment patterns with his children.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No

“The mainstream view of addiction in North America is that it's a choice, it's an ethical lapse, it's a bad decision, it's a moral failure. That's the mainstream view. How do we know it's the mainstream view? Because the entire legal apparatus is based on that perspective. If you are going to put somebody in jail for having done something, you have to believe that they made a choice to do it. If they didn't make a free choice, what are we punishing them for? So that's the belief.

But there's zero evidence that anybody "chooses" to be an addict. I've never met a single person.. I mean is there anybody here that actually woke up one morning and said "my ambition is to be an addict in life?" Raise your hand if you do because I want to hear your thinking on that. How many of you have had addiction issues, of some kind or another? How many of you chose to be an addict?

So then, if people don't choose it, why are we punishing them? But that's the mainstream view. And the whole social perspective, the way the media portraits the problem, the way movies depict it and how the entire criminal-justice system handles it is based on that ridiculous perspective.”
― Gabor Maté

“All addictions, substance related or not, share states of mind such as craving and shame and behaviors such as deception, manipulation, and relapse.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Any movement toward wholeness begins with the acknowledgment of our own suffering, and of the suffering in the world. This doesn’t mean getting caught in a never-ending vortex of pain, melancholy, and, especially, victimhood; a new and rigid identity founded on “trauma”—or, for that matter, “healing”—can be its own kind of trap. True healing simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We acknowledge where we were wounded and, as we are able, perform an honest audit of the impacts of those injuries as they have touched both our own lives and those of others around us.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Given this order of operations, children’s sense of security, trust in the world, interrelationships with others, and, above all, connection to their authentic emotions hinge on the consistent availability of attuned, non-stressed, and emotionally reliable caregivers. The more stressed or distracted the latter, the shakier the emotional architecture of the child’s mind will be.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“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 Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

“Studies on primates and other animals have also shown that low social status and being dominated enhance the risk of drug use, with negative effects on dopamine receptors. By contrast, after being housed with more subordinate animals, dominant monkeys had an increase of over 20 per cent of their dopamine receptors and less tendency to use cocaine. The findings of stress research suggest that the issue is not control over others, but whether one is free to exercise control in one’s own life. Yet the practices of the social welfare, legal and medical systems subject the addict to domination in many ways and deprive her of control, even if unwittingly.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Trauma is a constriction in your mental capacity to respond in the present moment from your authentic self. Essentially, trauma is a restriction of your authentic self in the present moment.

The capacity to be present with and understand and see the other human being for exactly who they are and to accept them for who they are and to invite them unconditionally to be in your presence exactly the way they are.. that is what love actually is.”
― Gabor Maté

“Cancer may be seen as a disease of cell replication. The normal processes of cell division and cell death are somehow subverted. A cell that should give rise to healthy offspring escapes from control and divides into malformed facsimiles that replicate themselves without regard to the biological needs of the organism. With millions of cells dying or being formed in the body every day, natural accident would, by itself, lead to a great number of spontaneous abnormal transformations. “It’s a fact that every one of us has a number of tiny cancerous tumours growing in our bodies at every moment,” writes Candace Pert.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No

“Depression—a mental state in which repression of anger dominates emotional functioning—interacts with cigarette smoking to lower the activity of NK cells.10”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No

“The physiology of human beings is very much affected by the environment and that's what may be called and I refer to as the bio-psycho-social perspective. We think that this may be new. Well, it is revolutionary as far as mainstream medicine is concerned, but it is certainly not new.

The Buddha said 2.500 years ago. He talked about the interconnection of everything, what he called "the interconnective core-rising" or "interdependent core-rising of phenomena". So he said "look at a raindrop. It doesn't just contain itself. In fact it contains the sky. Look at a leaf. It contains the sky, in terms of irrigation, it contains the earth, in terms of the materials that go into it and it contains the sun, in terms of the light that is needed to make it grow.

And he said that "the birth and death of any phenomena are connected to the birth and death of all other phenomena. The one contains the many and the many contains the one. Without the one there cannot be the many and without the many there cannot be the one". And that was said 2.500 years ago. A lesson we are still trying to integrate, to understand and to apply to our lives.”
― Gabor Maté

“Society would have much to gain from decriminalization. On the immediate practical level, we would feel safer in our homes and on our streets and much less concerned about the danger of our cars being burgled. In cities like Vancouver such crimes are often committed for the sake of obtaining drug money. More significantly perhaps, by exorcising this menacing devil of our own creation, we would automatically give up a lot of unnecessary fear. We could all breathe more freely. Many addicts could work at productive jobs if the imperative of seeking illegal drugs did not keep them constantly on the street.

It’s interesting to learn that before the War on Drugs mentality took hold in the early twentieth century, a prominent individual such as Dr. William Stewart Halsted, a pioneer of modern surgical practice, was an opiate addict for over forty years. During those decades he did stellar and innovative work at Johns Hopkins University, where he was one of the four founding physicians. He was the first, for example, to insist that members of his surgical team wear rubber gloves — a major advance in eradicating post-operative infections. Throughout his career, however, he never got by with less than 180 milligrams of morphine a day.

“On this,” said his colleague, the world-renowned Canadian physician Sir William Osler, “he could do his work comfortably and maintain his excellent vigor.” As noted at the Common Sense for Drug Policy website: Halsted’s story is revealing not only because it shows that with a morphine addiction the proper maintenance dose can be productive. It also illustrates the incredible power of the drug in question. Here was a man with almost unlimited resources — moral, physical, financial, medical — who tried everything he could think of and he was hooked until the day he died. Today we would send a man like that to prison. Instead he became the father of modern surgery.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Impulse control is one aspect of self-regulation. Impulses rise up from the lower brain centers and are meant to be permitted or inhibited by the cerebral cortex. A salient trait of the addiction-prone personality is a poor hold over sudden feelings, urges, and desires. Also characterizing the addiction-prone personality is the absence of differentiation.3 Differentiation is defined as “the ability to be in emotional contact with others yet still autonomous in one’s emotional functioning.” It’s the capacity to hold on to ourselves while interacting with others. The poorly differentiated person is easily overwhelmed by his emotions; he “absorbs anxiety from others and generates considerable anxiety within himself.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“To get through each day, natures that are at all high
strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor cars,
with different gears. There arc mountainous, arduous
days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and
downward-sloping days which one can descend at full
tilt, singing as one goes. - MARCEL PROUST, ln Search of Lost Time”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It