18 August 2021
In the middle of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Maté stated that
“People who cannot find or receive love need to find substitutes—and that’s where addictions come in” (2018, p. 231).
In the argument following that statement, Maté outlined the human requirement of being wanted and needed (connection). That arose as Dr. Maté outlined his own battle with behavioural addictions. Earlier in his career, the doctor would overbook himself to crazy extents as the demand for his presence, expressed by his pregnant patients, was intoxicating. He needed to be needed so, despite obvious conflicts, he would neglect his own family, well-being, and stress levels to bask in that sense of being valued.
In the 1950s, John Bowlby began looking at the need of newborns for their mothers. Reasoning that, unlike foals, who can run on the first day they’re born, human infants require over a year before their development allows then to take even a first fledgling step, so Bowlby looked to evolution. He may have been the first to understand the psychological implications of the fact that, if left alone, human infants perish. As such, they need protective adults to survive. If the Theory of Evolution is accurate, natural selection favours those infant-parent relationships in which a strong bond is formed, allowing infants to develop in a context of warm, affectionate support. This is attachment theory. I will wager that few people reading this blog received consistently warm, affectionate support throughout their first years. Here’s why.
As Dr. Maté explained, though he had loving, educated, and prosperous parents, he did not receive consistently warm, affectionate support. He was born into the Jewish community of soon-to-be Nazi-occupied Budapest. From the moment that occupation began, the physiology of his mother changed—radically. Her breathing became shortened and sometimes halted. Her musculature was more contracted and less relaxed changing how her arms, chest, and gait felt as she held him and moved. Her voice was more constricted and more highly pitched which would have alerted a completely dependent—and thus attentive—baby. No amount of love, education, or prosperity could have changed how Gabor and his mother related through those terror-filled days.
As a result of those physiological changes, the attachment between mother and son changed. In fact, his mother handed him to a non-Jewish stranger in the hope that her son would live. The young Gabor probably went from what Bowlby’s colleague, Mary Ainsworth, called secure attachment to insecure attachment. At some level, the infant boy no longer considered his world a safe, secure place. What would that sort of embodied realization do to a child?
John Bowlby was one of six siblings born into an upper-middle-class family in London, England. As was typical of that and higher classes, John was raised by hired nannies and sent to boarding school by age seven. Bowlby acknowledged that many of his questions, about parent-child attachments, arose from the feelings and self-doubts that his own upbringing provoked.
These brief historical facts illustrate that both Gabor and John lacked for consistently warm, affectionate support during their early years. As that deficiency would mark anyone, it marked them. Maté goes on to state that, rather than facing and dealing with those embodied voids, he sought escape in classical music. On the same page from which the quote in the first paragraph was taken, Maté wrote that, “Addiction, in this sense, is the lazy man’s path to transcendence.”
From that statement I understand him to be saying that escape is easier than struggle or, as was recently stated in a SMART Recovery meeting, The way out is the way through. Addiction’s equivalent statement might be, The way through is the way under, over, or around. The trouble is, when we seek to get around that which is within us, it just keeps following.
Astute readers might have noticed some of Maslow’s terminology creeping into this blog. I find it remarkable that the research brought to light by Bowlby and Maté points to the fact that, in addiction, we still seek transcendent love as a workaround to facing our unmet deficiency needs. More plainly stated, when a person with insecure attachment becomes aware of that weak attachment, she has some choices. Therapy, journaling and reflecting, versus intentional ignorance, or escapes from the pain. Those escapes are nearly limitless in variety: promiscuous sex, compulsive shopping, eating, gambling, drinking, or drug use will all do the trick. These choices cost lives.
Knowing this, I hope the fear of gently and slowly confronting the pain of insecure attachment is more visible and less terrifying. It is one of the keys to leaving addiction behind in pursuit of real love, beginning with the love of self.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
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