31/12/2025
A Love Letter to Gabor Maté
I don't know how to explain what Gabor Maté's work has meant to me without my voice cracking, or my pen, in this case, shaking. You see, his books live inside me now, rearranging rooms I didn't know existed, opening windows I'd boarded up years ago, letting light into places I thought had to stay dark forever.
There's something about the way Dr. Maté sees people that undoes me. When he worked with those drowning in addiction, people society had written off as hopeless and broken, he asked a question no one else was asking. Not "why the addiction?" but "why the pain?" And in that single shift, everything changed. Suddenly the woman in the alley wasn't merely making bad choices. She was trying to survive unbearable agony the only way she knew how. Maté looked at people everyone else had stopped seeing as human and whispered, "Tell me what hurt you." And in that question, in that willingness to see the wound instead of the symptom, he gave them back their humanity. He gave me back mine.
I read "When the Body Says No" while lying immobile, my body staging a rebellion I couldn't understand. And Maté explained with such devastating gentleness: your body isn't betraying you, it's been trying to tell you something for years and you wouldn't listen... Your body kept score. And now it's screaming because you wouldn't let it whisper. Reading that, I wept. Not from sadness but from recognition. My pain made sense. My exhaustion had reasons.
And what makes me trust Maté completely is that he writes from his own broken places. He doesn't pretend he's healed or sorted or above it all. He writes about his own ADHD, his compulsions, his childhood trauma as a Jewish infant in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Because he doesn't hide his brokenness, I don't have to hide mine. He's not a guru dispensing wisdom from some distant mountaintop. He's a fellow traveler in the valley, and his honesty, his vulnerability, his willingness to still be figuring it out; that's what makes his wisdom feel like truth instead of performance.
I think about Gabor Maté when I'm tired of pretending. When I'm exhausted from performing wellness I don't feel. When I need someone to remind me that being human means being vulnerable, being wounded, being in process, and that all of that isn't just acceptable but sacred.
So this is my love letter. To the doctor who sees our hungry ghosts and doesn't turn away. Who examines our diseases and finds the trauma underneath. Who studies our addictions and discovers the unbearable pain we're trying to soothe. Who looks at our modern lives and names them with unflinching honesty: incompatible with human flourishing.
Thank you, Dr. Maté. For your decades of sitting with people like me in ourr worst moments and refusing to look away. For seeing our pain and calling it what it is: an intelligent response to circumstances that wounded us.
If you've never read him, start anywhere your heart pulls you. "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" for understanding addiction. "When the Body Says No" for unexplained illness. "The Myth of Normal" for exhaustion from trying to be well in a sick world. "Scattered Minds" for ADHD. Each book is a different door into the same truth: you're not broken, you're just hurt, and hurt can heal if we're finally brave enough to feel it.
We need his voice. Now more than ever.
