Media: Brain Development & Addiction with Gabor Mate

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Dr Mate's comments on the differences between explicit memory and implicit unconscious emotional memory seem to be most relevant to an understanding of how TMS originates and functions I would say.

 

"A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture. The drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people and has limited means of escaping it. The rest of us find other ways of suppressing our fear of emptiness or of distracting ourselves from it. When we have nothing to occupy our minds, bad memories, troubling anxieties, unease, or the nagging mental stupor we call boredom can arise. At all costs, drug addicts want to escape spending 'alone time' with their minds. To a lesser degree, behavioral addictions are also responses to this terror of the void."

Gabor Mate', In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, p. 39.

One begins to wonder whether TMS pain performs the same psychological (and perhaps neuro-chemical) function as drug addiction, distracting us from a direct confrontation with what Dr Mate' calls "The Void"?

 

It sounds quite plausible to me, Bruce. They're both avoidance techniques, albeit one is a conscious act and one is not. There are so many "drugs" to choose from, but they all function to make a person's reality more bearable. We didn't exactly choose TMS, but the parallels are there. The subC acts to prevent us from feeling psychological pain.

 

If you read Dr Mate', Gigi, you'll learn that drug addiction is not exactly a 'conscious choice' on the part of the addict. It's a function of early childhood brain development that wasn't chosen so much as inflicted long before the individual had any choice in the matter. Seems as though ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) can predispose one for drug addiction the same way they prepare the way for subsequent development of TMS. At birth, we each get issued one brain!

 

when we get hyped up, tense, or anxious, or body releases adrenalin and other stress-related chemicals, which I believe can be addictive.

 

For many years I used alcohol to numb the emotional pain from an "adverse childhood experience". Now that I am aware of this and being educated about TMS I don't feel the need. If other stuff had been easily available I probably would have used it too.