Close Encounters with Addiction

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Gabor Mate. Close Encounters with Addiction

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Close Encounters with Addiction

Gabor Maté, MD

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What I’m also saying is that emptiness is precisely the foundation for addiction. Whenever we feel empty, whenever we allow ourselves to become defeated, or whenever we are impaired from knowing who we are, whenever we are disconnected from ourselves, addiction can flood in. It could just be flirtation. It could be in some cases repeated sexual acting out. It could be shopping, it could be gambling, it could be work, it could even be meditation, it could be exercise. In the case of the most affected individuals, it will be drugs—in such a way as to make their lives completely unmanageable; in fact, threaten their lives. Not only threaten their lives, but take their lives, as with many of the clients who I’ve worked with. But the basis of it all is the disconnect from themselves, a desperate emptiness. And that, of course, is the Buddhist image of the Hungry Ghost—these creatures with large, empty bellies, small scrawny necks, and tiny mouths and they are always trying to get satisfaction from the outside.

So the question is “What is that all about?” By the way, my little escapade of two weeks ago reminded me of the ending of the wonderful book The Plague, by Albert Camus. It takes place in Algeria and there’s a bubonic plague epidemic and it is Dr. Rieux, who is one of the people in the city who fights the plague and the rats that carry the plague. And the book ends by Camus writing that you have to be vigilant all the time because even though the plague had been defeated this time, you never know when the rats will come back carrying their deadly organisms again into the heart of the city, and that’s how it is with all of us.

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