01/17/2026
There's a photograph of Gabor Maté as an infant, eleven months old, hollow-eyed, staring at the camera with the kind of blankness that shouldn't exist on a baby's face.
He was born in Budapest in 1944. If you know anything about history, you know that's the worst possible time and place to be born Jewish. By the time he was a year old, the N***s had invaded Hungary. His grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz. His mother, frantic with terror, gave him away to strangers multiple times to keep him alive. She'd hand him to people she barely knew and disappear, hoping they'd hide him, hoping she'd survive long enough to reclaim him.
Imagine being an infant and your mother keeps leaving. You can't understand war or genocide. You just know: she's here, then she's gone. Here, then gone. And each time she comes back, you've been with someone else, in some strange place, held by unfamiliar hands.
That's where it started for Gabor. That primal wound of abandonment, because despite love, survival demanded it. And that distinction, between intentional harm and necessary harm, is som**hing Gabor's spent his entire life trying to help people understand.
They survived the war. Moved to Canada when he was twelve. He became a doctor, got married, had kids, built what looked like a successful life. But inside, he was drowning.
His wife tells a story about how when their kids were young, Gabor would be physically present but mentally absent. Playing with them while thinking about his next article, his next patient, his next achievement. Present but not present. There but not there. She called him out. Told him he was barely present with his children. That he was there physically but gone mentally, always chasing the next thing, the next accomplishment, the next hit of whatever could fill the void that formed when he was one year old and learned that love means leaving.
Sound familiar, right? It's the same pattern his mother had to enact when he was an infant. There but not there. Present but absent. Love interrupted by necessity. And Gabor spent decades unconsciously recreating that dynamic with his own children until his wife forced him to see it. That confrontation broke him, and pushed him to start looking at his own behavior with the same lens he used for patients.
He went to work in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the poorest postal code in Canada, treating people with severe addictions, he**in, crack, crystal m**h. People everyone else had given up on. And Gabor looked at them and saw himself.
They were medicating pain. He was medicating pain. They used drugs. He used work and achievement and compulsive shopping. Different substances, same mechanism. All of them trying to fill a hole that formed before language, before memory, in those early moments when safety got confused with danger and love got tangled up with loss.
He wrote about this in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, his book about addiction. The title comes from Buddhism, hungry ghosts are beings with enormous appetites and tiny throats. They can never get enough. They're eternally starving. And Gabor says that's addiction. Not moral failure. Not weakness. Just people trying to feed a hunger that can't be fed because the wound isn't in the present. It's in the past, in those early moments when their nervous systems got wired for survival instead of connection.
The revolutionary thing Gabor articulates almost better than anyone is that addiction isn't about the substance. It's about the pain. People don't get addicted to drugs. They get addicted to the relief drugs provide from pain they can't otherwise manage. And that pain almost always traces back to childhood trauma, to those moments when you learned the world isn't safe, when attachment got disrupted, when you had to develop coping mechanisms that helped you survive but are now destroying you.
But his work isn't popular with everyone. Some people hate that he shows compassion to addicts. They want addiction to be about personal responsibility, about choices, about people who just need to try harder. Gabor says sure, there's choice involved, but not the kind we think.
The choice isn't "should I use drugs today?" The choice was made years ago when their brains were forming, when trauma wired them for dysregulation, when they learned that pain is permanent and relief is worth any cost.
His latest work focuses on how trauma isn't just what happens to you. It's what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. You can have two people go through the same terrible event and one develops PTSD and one doesn't. The difference isn't the event. It's what resources they had, what support systems were in place, what their nervous system learned about safety and danger before the trauma even occurred.
Gabor is teaching us to ask better questions. Not "what's wrong with you?" but "what happened to you?" Not "why are you so weak?" but "what pain are you trying to manage?" Those questions change everything. They move us from judgment to curiosity. From punishment to empathy. From seeing people as broken to seeing them as wounded.
Gabor's still working through his own trauma at seventy-nine. Still discovering new ways his childhood shaped his adulthood. And that's the gift he gives us. Not the promise that healing is possible but the evidence that it's necessary. That we're all walking around with wounds we don't remember receiving. That those wounds drive behaviors we don't understand. And that compassion, for ourselves and others, is the only way forward.
I made a documentary on Gabor Maté because his story deserves to be told in full. As evidence that you can be brilliant and broken at the same time. That you can help thousands of people while still struggling with your own demons.
Watch here: https://youtu.be/9kt1Xi2tFJgdd
