In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté M.D

Author:Gabor Maté, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-05-29T06:00:00+00:00

As prisoner Stephen Reid listens to the story of my infancy during our exchange at the William Head Institution, he shakes his head and looks even more discouraged than before. “But you had these tragic beginnings,” he says, “and yet you’re free. You have a career. I had nothing like that happen to me, and here I am in jail again, where I’ve been most of my life due to my flaws and character weakness—my moral failure.”

I see it differently, and not at all in terms of the harsh judgment Stephen has passed on himself. Apart from the severities we endured in my first year and a half or so, I was brought up in a stable, educated middle-class home by two parents who, for all their human flaws, gave loving, nurturing care to their children and to one another in the long term. Stephen, on the other hand, had a highly stressed and intimidated child for a mother, at least during his early years: he was born to a fifteen-year-old girl who was married to a raging alcoholic. His entire childhood was marked by poverty, shame, fear and emotional insecurity. “If anything disturbed my dad’s world,” he says, “he responded with blind fury.”

Stephen was eleven years old when the town physician drove him out to the countryside, injected him with morphine and then initiated a relationship of drug-enabled sexual exploitation that persisted for many months. At the first hit of morphine the pre-adolescent Stephen was overawed by wonder as his brain flooded with opiates his own circuits could never produce. “What did that feel like?” I ask. “Like a warm, wet blanket,” he replies, “a place of safety—the safety that came before pain and danger, before the enormity of being born, pushed and dragged, kicking and screaming into this world.” The sex trade worker who told me that her first hit of heroin was like a warm, soft hug was fantasizing a state of infant joy. Stephen’s “warm, wet blanket” harkens back even further, to the womb—perhaps the last time he’d had a sense of security.

I had a similar, if much milder, epiphany when in my mid-forties I was prescribed a serotonin-enhancing antidepressant. I was suffused by a sense of well-being I’d never imagined was possible. It’s as if my brain cells were bathed in a normal chemical milieu for the first time. “So this is how human beings are meant to feel,” I remarked to my sister-in-law. You don’t know how depressed you’ve been until you know what it feels like not to be depressed. For both Stephen and me, given the early stresses that influenced our brain physiology, the newly experienced chemical state was a revelation.

How, then, to explain the addictions of people who, like my son Daniel, grew up in relatively comfortable circumstances, with parents who, contrary to being abusive or neglectful, did their best? To answer that question we need to revisit the issue of infancy and childhood, and the unique quality of attunement that optimal brain development requires.

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