Gabor Maté quotes

Gabor Maté is a renowned Hungarian-Canadian physician, speaker, and author who specializes in the study of mind-body connections and the effects of stress and trauma on physical and mental health. With over 20 years of experience in the field, Maté has written several best-selling books and conducted countless workshops and lectures on topics such as addiction, ADHD, and mental health. His unique approach to healing emphasizes the importance of understanding the underlying causes of illness and addressing them holistically. Learn more about Gabor Maté and his groundbreaking work in integrative medicine by exploring his books and attending his lectures.

The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.

- Gabor Maté

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.

- Gabor Maté

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.

- Gabor Maté

Trauma is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.

- Gabor Maté

Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.

- Gabor Maté

Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear.

- Gabor Maté

The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.

- Gabor Maté

The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves. Trauma is not terrible things that happen from the other side—those are traumatic. But the trauma is that very separation from the body and emotions.

- Gabor Maté

The essence of capitalism is to separate the mind from the body. And, basically, people are all considered material goods. People matter only insofar as they produce, consume, or own matter. If you don’t produce, consume, or own matter, then you don’t matter in this society.

- Gabor Maté

The DSM defines attention deficit disorder by its external features, not by its emotional meaning in the lives of individual human beings.

- Gabor Maté

The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness.

- Gabor Maté

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

- Gabor Maté

Since we live in a society that largely denies human developmental needs—doesn’t even understand them, let alone provide for them—you’re going to have a lot of people affected in adverse ways. Most of the population, in fact. And so then to separate out those who meet the particular criteria for a particular diagnosis from the rest of us is utterly unscientific and unhelpful.

- Gabor Maté

Our true nature is to be connected. In fact, if that wasn’t our true nature, there would be no human beings. The human species – or any species — could not evolve without being grounded in their bodies. You couldn’t have a bunch of intellectuals walking around out there in the wild, wondering in an abstract sense about the meaning of life, when there’s a saber-toothed tiger lurking behind the next bush.

- Gabor Maté

Our birthright as human beings is to be happy, and the addict just wants to be a human being.

- Gabor Maté

Not why the addiction but why the pain.

- Gabor Maté

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

Medical students and psychiatrists, for example, never learn that stuff. Most physicians don’t even hear the word trauma in their education and they have no understanding of it. Every time they see somebody with an autoimmune disease or mental illness, they’re looking at somebody who’s traumatized, but they don’t realize that. So therefore we deal with only with the physical manifestations, but not the actual causes.

- Gabor Maté

Love felt by the parent does not automatically translate into love experienced by the child.

- Gabor Maté

It’s not an automatic outcome of living in the world that we should become disconnected. It’s a product of a certain way of life and a certain way of parenting and certain childhood experiences, where it becomes too painful to stay connected so disconnection becomes a defense.

- Gabor Maté

If our environment cannot support our gut feelings and our emotions, then the child, in order to 'belong' and 'fit in' will automatically, unwittingly and unconsciously, suppress their emotions and their connections to themselves, for the sake of staying connected to the nurturing environment, without which the child cannot survive. A lot of children are in this dilemma – Can I feel and express what I feel or do I have to suppress that in order to be acceptable, to be a good kid, to be a nice kid?

- Gabor Maté

I think normalcy is a myth. The idea that some people have pathology and the rest of us are normal is crude. There’s nothing about any mentally ill person—and it doesn’t matter what their diagnosis is—that I couldn’t recognize in myself. The reality is that, in every case, mental illness is an outcome of traumatic events. And by trauma I don’t mean dramatic events. There’s a difference.

- Gabor Maté

I believe that ADD can be better understood if we examine people’s lives, not only bits of DNA.

- Gabor Maté

Human biology and human neurobiology are interpersonal. The brain is a social organ, and it’s affected by the environment, and particularly it’s affected by the psycho-emotional environment.

- Gabor Maté

Collect them before you direct them.

- Gabor Maté

Children are a great incentive and impetus for parents to learn about themselves, about each other and about life itself. Unfortunately, much of the learning may occur at their expense.

- Gabor Maté

Autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything.

- Gabor Maté

An addiction is any behavior, substance related or not, that an individual pursues because they find pleasure, relief, or they crave it temporarily, so they pursue the pleasure and relief despite negative consequences. And they don’t give it up, in the face of negative consequences. I said any behavior. So that could be sex, gambling, eating, shopping, work, relationships, or substances.

- Gabor Maté

Addiction is not a choice that anybody makes; it’s not a moral failure; it’s not an ethical lapse; it’s not a weakness of character; it’s not a failure of will, which is how our society depicts addiction. Nor is it an inherited brain disease, which is how our medical tendency is to see it. What it actually is: it’s a response to human suffering, and all these people that I worked with had been serially traumatized as children. All the women had been sexually abused. All the men had been traumatized, some of them sexually, physically, emotionally neglected. And not only is that my perspective, it’s also what the scientific and research literature show. So addiction then, rather than being a disease as such or a human choice, it’s an attempt to escape suffering temporarily.

- Gabor Maté

Addiction is not a choice that anybody makes; it’s not a moral failure. What it actually is: it’s a response to human suffering.

- Gabor Maté