Addiction Quotes

The events that occur in my life are workout situations. They are there for my benefit so I can become strong and gain wisdom and information by working my way through those situations.

~ Chris Prentiss

Every pain, addiction, anguish, longing, depression, anger or fearis an orphaned part of usseeking joy, some disowned shadow wanting to returnto the lightand homeof ourselves.

~ Jacob Nordby

Habits are good if you have the habit of the best.

~ Amit Kalantri

See, I am very dependent... on beauty and peace of the world... on loyalty of friends... on love in families... on happiness and health of children. And I do not want to be free as long as I have it all...

~ Galina Nelson

Most stories are not about peoplebut about life, an addiction like the rest of themthat destroys you even as you love it,but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

~ Michael Hogan

society's been drugging its women for years

~ Elizabeth Strout

It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.

~ Steven Kassels

Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...

~ Martin Hopkins

Nothing is ‘wrong’ with me, Dan. What’s wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.

~ Martin Hopkins

The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,but more importantly, trodden upon.

~ Martin Hopkins

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies, it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

~ Susan Sontag

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

~ C.g. Jung

An intelligent person can rationalize anything, a wise person doesn't try.

~ Jen Knox

Be an informed advocate and support.

~ Asa Don Brown

There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: we search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like – well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit”, looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough.

~ Kelly Mcgonigal

Narrow behaviourist thinkingpermeates political and social policy and medical practice, thechildrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academicdiscourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a fullunderstanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causesare not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an experton the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in theNational Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seemsastonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be nounderstanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pindown at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, areoften the active representations of emotional states and of specialkinds of brain functioning.As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brainpatterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with varioussocial and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must striveto change not them but their environments. These are the only thingswe can change. Transformation of the addict must come from withinand the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is muchthat we can do.

~ Gabor Maté

Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We’d all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away.

~ Katandra Jackson Nunnally

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

~ Stefan Molyneux

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

~ Gabor Maté

May you begin living beyond.

~ Asa Don Brown

Change must start from the individual. And the individual must want and feel ready to make such change.

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Addiction is the primary way people escape the modern world. Unfortunately, it is destroying the modern world.

~ Christyl Rivers

Take a few minutes now and see your current circumstances- your physical condition, your emotional condition, your possessions, your financial condition, where and how you live, your relationships, the situations surrounding your life, and the way you believe other people see you- as mirrors showing you Who You Are.

~ Chris Prentiss

The world actually is a mirror, and as you change, you will see everything around you changing as well as mirroring your changes.

~ Chris Prentiss

What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don’t need to be wasted on naming things.

~ Doug Cooper

We are not consumers. For most of humanity’s existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food.We are not addicts. “I propose that most addictions come from our surrendering our real powers, that is, our powers of creativity.” We are not passive couch potatoes either. “It is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages…. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed… to be excited, to be enthusiastic, to be expressive. In short to be alive.” We are also not cogs in a machine. To be so would be to give up our personal freedoms so as to not upset The Machine, whatever that machine is. Creativity keeps us creating the life we wish to live and advancing humanity’s purpose as well.

~ Matthew Fox

The ultimate computer game would be a 'total addiction' - a game that shapes itself to the elements you most like to play in such a manner that it totally satisfies you. You never want to stop playing. However, any self-configuring activity always has such risks inherent in it. Will we see one day the goverment insisting that games have time limiters the way that some motor vehicles have speed limiters?

~ Ian Pearson

In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin.

~ Terri Blackstock

Coming down for the thousandth time, I'm perched on the precipice of a billion broken promises. I'm speeding through the intersections of my own broken heartstrings, blowing red lights and ignoring red flags. I'm thinking, 'history repeats itself.' I'm wondering why. The world outside is still happening also.

~ Kris Kidd

Sometimes, when I'm chain-smoking and feeling like shit (which happens more often than I'd like to admit), I let go of a lit cigarette just to see if the ember will outlast the fall.It rarely does.

~ Kris Kidd

Another piano falls, but this time it's me— or my lascivious loneliness, or my grab bag of mental instabilities and emotional shortcomings, or whatever.

~ Kris Kidd

A hand-rolled cigarette to smoke,Another one bought from the store.If he lights one, his mind's lit upAnother one burns a hole..

~ Sanhita Baruah

Those drugs were either going to bring me nirvana or they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. And I was comfortable with it.

~ Joss Sheldon

Attitudes and ignorance” about (any type of) abuse can be passed down through the generations. It is important to our healing that we sort out the belief systems we adopt; belief systems that were taught to us and because they are so full of lies, they lead to all kinds of depressions, addictions and other struggles while we try to cope with the manifestations of the problems instead of the roots of the problems.

~ Darlene Ouimet

You burn bright and you burn hard, like a fire in a dumpster,and nobody is so worriedabout you burning as they are worried about the fire spreading.

~ Kris Kidd

I remember a scared, young girl hiding in the guise of arrogance and rebellion. I remember feeling lost in a world where everyone else seemed to have it all figured out. I remember the tears of pain, the rants of anger and the hell that seemed to have swallowed me whole. Although I remember these things, it is now, over a decade later, more like a story that I find hard to believe. Did it all really happen? Even as I write this, my eyes begin to swell. It really did happen. I was that girl. And I’m sorry she had to suffer so. But, that is over now...

~ Karen Michelle Miller

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

~ Norah Vincent

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

~ Norah Vincent

You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.

~ Chris Prentiss

It's the causes, not the dependent person, that must be corrected. That's why I see the United States' War on Drugs as being fought in an unrealistic manner. This war is focused on fighting drug dealers and the use of drugs here and abroad, when the effort should be primarily aimed at treating and curing that causes that compel people to reach for drugs.

~ Chris Prentiss