62 Quotes by Gabor Maté

Learn to read symptoms not only as problems to be overcome but as messages to be heeded.

Since the immune confusion that leads to disease reflects a failure to distinguish self from non-self, healing has to involve establishing or reclaiming the boundaries of an autonomous self.

While it is true that genuine joy and satisfaction enhance physical well-being, “positive” states of mind generated to tune out psychic discomfort lower resistance to illness.

The distressing internal state is not examined: thefocus is entirely on the outside: What can Ireceive from the world thatwill make me feel okay, if only for a moment? Bare attention can showher that these moods and feelings have only the meaning and powerthat she gives them. Eventually she will realize that there is nothing torun away from. Situations might need to be changed, but there is nointernal hell that one must escape by dulling or stimulating the mind.

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.

Passion creates, addiction consumes.

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

To live with an addict of any kind is frustrating, emotionally painful and often infuriating. Family, friends and spouse may feel they are dealing with a double personality: one sane and loveable, the other devious and uncaring. They believe the first is real and hope the second will go away. In truth, the second is the shadow side of the first and will no sooner leave than will a shadow abandon the object whose shape it traces on the ground—not unless the light comes from a different angle.

Misplaced attachment to what cannot satiate the soul is not an error exclusive to addicts, but the common condition of mankind