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The more specialized doctors become, the more they know about a body part or organ and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part or organ resides.
Many of us live, if not alone, then in emotionally inadequate relationships that do not recognize or honour our deepest needs. Isolation and stress affect many who may believe their lives are quite satisfactory.
without feeling responsible for someone else’s disappointment.
“At a time when patients are already burdened by disease, they should not be further burdened by having to accept responsibility for the outcome.”
The impulse to hide the limp was not conscious, and the act was done before I was aware of it.
impulse to protect my mother from my pain, even in such an innocuous situation,
We are all self-deniers and self-betrayers to one extent or another,
Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs our ability to see reality.
The fundamental problem is not the external stress, such as the life events quoted in the studies, but an environmentally conditioned helplessness that permits neither of the normal responses of fight or flight. The resulting internal stress becomes repressed and therefore invisible. Eventually, having unmet needs or having to meet the needs of others is no longer experienced as stressful. It feels normal. One is disarmed.
no one who mattered ever truly listened.
For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness.
excessive stress occurs when the demands made on an organism exceed that organism’s reasonable capacities to fulfill them.
“It may be said without hesitation,” Hans Selye wrote, “that for man the most important stressors are emotional.”
The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways.
a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression.
to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood.
For the child it is no relief to feel sadness or anger if no one is there to receive those emotions and to provide some comfort and containment.
Rage and anguish exist underneath the veneer of niceness,
Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person’s unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.
I’m not worried my kids will be angry with me, I’m worried they won’t be angry enough.
When the woman is married to an immature man, she is also a mother to her husband, so she hasn’t got the openness and the energy for her kids.
“Psychological factors such as uncertainty, conflict, lack of control, and lack of information are considered the most stressful stimuli and strongly activate the HPA axis.
Sense of control and consummatory behaviour result in immediate suppression of HPA activity.”
Only close to her death did Gilda finally learn that she could not be mother to the world. “I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do. I
My self-esteem was very low, so I thought socially that if I made others happy, then they would accept me.
that the first two had had enough love in their lives to hold on to the part of themselves that allowed for the development of a fighting spirit. Unlike Francis, they also both received powerful caring and support from family and friends when they were diagnosed.
indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing
not the lack of someone to love him. Rather, he said, “I missed not having someone to love.”
“I’m stubborn. Whenever I’m sick, I always have this underlying fear that I won’t be believed or that I’ll be seen as a hypochondriac.”
That anyone would want her without expecting anything is well nigh impossible for her to fathom.
how could the absence of something or somebody create such disturbances. . . .
The patterns of people’s speech and the key words they “happen” to employ are more meaningful descriptors of their childhoods than what they consciously believe they are communicating.
The real story is told by the patterns of the narrative—fluent or halting, detailed or characterized by a paucity of words, consistent or self-contradicting,
Parenting, in short, is a dance of the generations. Whatever affected one generation but has not been fully resolved will be passed on to the next.
Such lies, however innocently intended, never protect a child from pain. There is something in us that knows when we are lied to,
adaptation energy. “It is as though we had hidden reserves of adaptability, or adaptation energy, throughout the body. . . . Only when all of our adaptability is used up will irreversible, general exhaustion and death follow.”
Inappropriate symbiosis between parent and child is the source of much pathology.
The] separation of infants from their mothers and all other types of relocation which leave few possibilities for interpersonal contact are very common forms of sensory deprivation; they may become major factors in disease,”
reject the spurious concept that people need to be useful in order to be valued.
Do we magnify or minimize potential threats to our well-being? Do we perceive ourselves as alone? As helpless? As never needing help? As never deserving help? As being loved? As having to work to deserve love? As hopelessly unlovable?
So what’s wrong with not being strong enough?”
As soon as we qualify the word thinking with the adjective positive, we exclude those parts of reality that strike us as “negative.” That is how most people who espouse positive thinking seem to operate. Genuine positive thinking begins by including all our reality. It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be.
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In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively.
What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden.
One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom.
Pinocchio-like, and says, “How foolish I was when I was a puppet.”
When one lacks the capacity to feel heat, the risk of being burned increases.
“Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,”
