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Let me begin by paying tribute to Gabor Maté's dedicated and humane medical care for inner-city Vancouver drug addicts under the auspices of the Portland Hotel Society, where I have spent some time.
In addition, let me note that Gabor and I share some fundamental precepts about addiction:
- Addiction is not limited to drugs and alcohol
- Addiction is not genetically determined
- Meaning that people acquire addictive tendencies over their lifetimes
For Gabor, this translates into trauma über alles—he believes that every case of addiction is traceable to a childhood traumatic experience. Moreover, he maintains, this trauma causes permanent brain damage, leaving people predisposed to be addicted—if not in fact addicted—their whole lives.
This creates the following set of problems :
- Most people who experience trauma don't become addicted. The Vancouver addicts Gabor dealt with, and with whom I visited, are at the extreme end of the spectrum of people who have experienced severe, repeated trauma in their lives.
- Perhaps most important of all, most people who become addicted overcome it.
- Focusing on people's trauma is not an effective way to combat addiction. Moreover, forcing people to accept that they have been traumatized actually makes recovery harder, and can, in itself, be traumatic.
But the Maté trauma movement has become an overwhelming tidal wave in North America, and worldwide.
My initial analysis of Gabor Maté's work, posted in Psychology Today Blogs in 2011, "The Seductive (but Dangerous) Allure of Gabor Maté," which has had 110,000 views and counting, has produced a landslide of attacks, the most recent from Anonymous:
This is complete defamation! And, why would Psychology Today agree to post this article?!! Just unbelievable.
The response to the article (written with Alan Cudmore, a youth specialist at Canada's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health), which I reckoned was a reasoned, data-based critique of the consequences of Maté's focusing people on the real or supposed trauma in their lives, shows that Maté is sacrosanct, beyond the reach of any critical commentary, a kind of new AA. (Gabor lauds Alcoholics Anonymous, along with powerlessness and contrition, as "essential."*)
When I met with Gabor in 2013 (which I described in Substance.com) ostensibly (I thought) to seek rapprochement, it presented Maté with the opportunity to use with me his patented technique of, unsolicited, ferreting out a person's trauma in order to prove his point.
Claire McConnell, a Canadian activist on behalf of young LGBT people with substance issues, wrote to me recently:
The reason I am writing to you is that, I think nine years ago, when [Claire's child] was in a residential youth treatment program and I was really struggling with my role in all this as a parent, I went to a conference in Toronto and one of the presenters was Gabor Maté. He spoke during his presentation about how all addiction is (at least as I heard it) due to bad parenting. I had a very hard time hearing this. I felt guilty enough about what had happened (was in therapy to deal with all that was going on) and now he was confirming all my worst fears—it WAS my fault. I went up to him afterwards and tried to talk to him about his position on this. He was patronizing and dismissive and basically told me that I obviously hadn’t yet come to grips with “what I had done” to create the situation. He left me literally shaking with rage.
I do respect the work he has done with the population in Vancouver, but find his view of addictions deeply troubling. And if you question or challenge him, it’s obviously you that is at fault, so there is no chance of healthy dialogue. You either buy in to the whole package or you are wrong. That’s never a healthy position to take. My friends know how I feel about him. This morning one of my friends who also works in addictions sent me your article about your breakfast with him. I felt so empowered after I read it (I have, by the way, resolved my guilt about “did I cause this?”). I completely agree with what you said, and it was so great to read it. I’ve never come across anything before that actually challenges him. So thank you so very much for writing the article.
Ms. McConnell's description of her brief interaction with Gabor raises two questions: Would Anonymous charge her with defamation? And did Gabor traumatize her? I discuss the downsides of Gabor's trauma approach to addiction in my book with Ilse Thompson, Recover!: An Empowering Program to Help You Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life, which lays out a mindfulness-forgiveness-self-empowerment alternative.
My next post is a first-person account of how Gabor bears down on anyone in his workshops who has the temerity (and it takes guts) to claim their addictions are not due to trauma. As for critics of my post writing in, do consider whether you have been complicit in producing trauma in this way.
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* “The principles of the 12 steps are essential: The recognition of the powerlessness over addiction. You gain power and end your denial by acknowledging your powerlessness. . . . Spiritual emptiness is addressed by that acknowledgement of a Higher Power and then, of course, that’s repeated through the moral inventory of your behaviors and their effects on other people."
