“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do
believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the
centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the
Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. 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.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.”
―
―
“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what
relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive
behaviour.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Not every story has a happy ending, ... but the discoveries of
science, the teachings of the heart, and the revelations of the soul all
assure us that 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.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is
not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they
induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the
world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned
implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We
create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and
then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created.
Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on
the past...Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden,
past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our
worldview.’Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and
its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach
that point, you are unconscious.’ …In present awareness we are liberated
from the past.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“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.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Not why the addiction but why the pain.”
―
―
“A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between
feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom
I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with
guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt.
Resentment is soul suicide. Negative thinking allows us to gaze
unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work.
We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking — or, more deeply, positive being — empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.”
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking — or, more deeply, positive being — empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.”
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
“Passion creates, addiction consumes.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the
greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our
own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems
nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our
lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through.
If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it's only because in
their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed.
Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and
supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate
self-inquiry.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“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”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject
fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends
feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused
with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated
from the burden of the past and the fear of the future—the two elements
that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict
in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void
at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with
those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting.
Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only
serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant,
intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so
many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of
addiction—and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the
mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the
reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to
cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get
rid of the pain, the greater the pain.”14 So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even
our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet
chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal
and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices
within.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Boredom, rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“I needed to write, to express myself through written language not
only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“We see that substance addictions are only one specific form of
blind attachment to harmful ways of being, yet we condemn the addict's
stubborn refusal to give up something deleterious to his life or to the
life of others. Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict,
when as a social collective, we share the same blindness and engage in
the same rationalizations?”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“The research literature has identified three factors that
universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the
loss of control.”
― When the Body Says No
― When the Body Says No
“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety,
ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis,
are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma.
Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the
medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the
explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's
behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has
psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing
that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It
has meaning in every single case.”
―
―
“What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits
and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but
the loss of it.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Music gives me a sense of self-sufficiency and nourishment. I
don’t need anyone or anything. I bathe in it as in amniotic fluid; it
surrounds and protects me. It’s also stable, ever-available and
something I can control - that is, I can reach for it whenever I want. I
can also choose music that reflects my mood, or if I want, helps to
soothe it…music-seeking offers excitement and tension that I can
immediately resolve and a reward I can immediately attain - unlike other
tensions in my life and other desired rewards. Music is a source of
beauty and meaning outside myself that I can claim as my own without
exploring how, in my life, I keep from directly experiencing those
qualities. Addiction, in this sense, is the lazy man’s path to
transcendence.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions,
so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; the ability to
express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to
maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; the facility to
distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the
present situation and those that represent residue from the past.
What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others. Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health.
In each of the individual histories of illness in this book, one or more aspect of emotional competence was significantly compromised, usually in ways entirely unknown to the person involved. Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine.”
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others. Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health.
In each of the individual histories of illness in this book, one or more aspect of emotional competence was significantly compromised, usually in ways entirely unknown to the person involved. Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine.”
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
“We think that children act, whereas what they mostly do is react.
Parents who realize this acquire a powerful tool. By noticing their own
responses to the child, rather than fixating on the child’s responses
to them, they free up tremendous energy for growth.”
― Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It
― Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It
“Not the world, not what’s outside of us, but what we hold inside
traps us. 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.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.”
― When the Body Says No
― When the Body Says No
“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.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of
self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no
more than a person’s unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill
what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.”
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
“all addictions—whether to drugs or to non-drug behaviors—share
the same brain circuits and brain chemicals. On the biochemical level
the purpose of all addictions is to create an altered physiological
state in the brain. This can be achieved in many ways, drug taking being
the most direct. So an addiction is never purely “psychological”; all
addictions have a biological dimension.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“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.”
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
― In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
“Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we
will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of
shame impairs our ability to see reality.”
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
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