174 Quotes About Addiction-and-recovery

Compassionate curiosity directed toward the self leads to the truth of things.

[A]ccept that the addiction exists not because of yourself, but in spite of yourself. You did not come into life asking to be programmed this way. It’s not personal to you—millions of others with similar experiences have developed the same mechanisms. What is personal to you is how you respond to it in the present.

[A]ddiction to opiates like morphine and heroin arises in a brain system that governs the most powerful emotional dynamic in human existence: the attachment instinct. Love.

For all their complexities, emotions exist for a very basic purpose: to initiate and maintain activities necessary for survival. In a nutshell, they modulate two drives that are absolutely essential to animal life, including human life: attachment and aversion.

Freedom of choice, understood from the perspective of brain development, is not a universal or fixed attribute but a statistical probability. In other words, given a certain set of life experiences a human being will have either lesser or greater probability of having freedom in the realm of the psyche.

[A] key determining factor triggering the stress response is the way a person perceives a situation. We ourselves give events their meaning, depending on our personal histories, temperament, physical condition and state of mind at the moment we experience them. Thus the degree to which we’re stressed may depend less on external circumstances than on how well we are able to take care of ourselves physically and emotionally.

Opiates do not “take away” pain. Instead, they reduce our consciousness of it as an unpleasant stimulus. Pain begins as a physical phenomenon, registered in the brain, but we may or may not consciously notice it at any given moment. What we call “being in pain” is our subjective experience of that stimulus—i.e., “Ouch, that hurts”—and our emotional reaction to the experience.

Anatomically, physical pain is registered in one part of the brain, the thalamus, but its subjective impact is experienced in another part, the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. The brain gets the pain message in the thalamus, but “feels” it in the ACC. This latter area “lights up,” or is activated, when we are reacting to the pain stimulus. And it’s in the cortex—the ACC and elsewhere—that opiates help us endure pain by reducing not its physical but its emotional impact.

It’s not that genes do not matter—they certainly do; it’s only that they do not and cannot determine even simple behaviours, let alone complex ones like addiction. Not only is there no addiction gene, there couldn’t be one.