For the past month I have been slowly progressing through Gabor Maté’s “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Close Encounters With Addiction.” A very hard read and a revealing one. I started the book with the intention of discovering a bit of the puzzle surrounding my late brother’s overdose induced demise and … I found myself in the book more than I ever expected. This struck so close to home:
Along with my positive qualities- intellectual confidence, strengths, passions and commitments – there has always lurked near the very core of me a churning, inchoate anxiety. Had I been able to be honest with myself and had I been prepared to accept vulnerability, I would have declared at many stages in my life, as Clarissa did, ‘I’m scared. I’m so very scared.’ My anxiety clothes itself in concerns about image or financial security, doubts regarding loveability, or the ability to love, self-disparagement and existential pessimism about life’s meaning and purpose – or, on the other hand, it manifests itself as grandiosity, the need to be admired, to be seen as special. I feel sure it was forged in my chest cavity somewhere between my lungs and heart long before I knew the names of things.
Do I have reasons to be anxious? By it’s very nature, chronic anxiety has nothing to do with ‘reasons’. First it springs into being and much later, once we develop the ability to think, it recruits thoughts and explanations to serve it. In contrast to healthy anxiety (for which a better word is fear) felt in the face of danger – like the fear a gazelle might experience in the presence of a hungry lion or that a small child might feel when his parents are not in sight, chronic anxiety is not rooted in the experience of the moment. It precedes thought. We may believe we’re anxious about this or that – body image, the state of the world, relationship issues, the weather- but no matter what story we weave around it, the anxiety just is. Like addiction itself, anxiety will always find a target, but exists independently of it targets. Only when we become aware of it does it wrap itself in identifiable colors. More often we repress it, bury it under ideas, identifications, deeds, beliefs and relationships. We build above it a mound of activities and attributes that we mistake for our true selves. We then expend our energies trying to convince the world that our self made fiction is reality. As genuine as our strengths and achievements may be, they cannot but feel hollow until we acknowledge the anxiety they cover up.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Close Encounters with Addiction, Gabor Maté, pg. 334, 335
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