More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Ilana Stanger-Ross summed up traditional wisdom and modern science in words that, in a saner system, wouldn’t even need to be said: “We need to approach someone in labor as a full person who is experiencing a sacred life passage,” she told me. “They’re not a sick patient. They are a person in labor—which is a very normal thing to be.”
we’ll look at two ways modern Western culture’s idea of normal undermines parenting: the erosion of our instinct for the enterprise, and the creation of isolating or stressful conditions inimical to raising healthy children.
It so happens that parents today take their cues from a culture that has lost touch with both the child’s developmental needs and what parents require to be able to meet those needs.
anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s description of traditional parenting practices among Netsilik Inuit in Canada’s Northwest Territories: “The Netsilik mother, even though she lives under the most difficult of conditions, is an unruffled personality who bestows warmth and loving care upon her children. She never chides her infant or interferes with it in any way, except to respond to its need.”4 Somehow, it seems, these children managed to grow into productive and yes, socialized, members of their communities
“In our culture,” she said, “we have pretty much unnested our children. We are missing most of the components of what helps a baby grow into their full potential, their systems to develop properly. That’s the unnestedness.”
Oster writes that “motherhood can be lonely and isolating.” Too true—but those attributes pertain not to motherhood itself but to motherhood in an alienating culture.
A culture where Nature has become the exception is a culture in trouble.
To do the job evolution has tasked us with, and to access and trust our natural instincts designed for that job, we need each other, and we need communal and social support—just as surely as our children need us.
“You can’t say that parents are incredibly important in the lives of their children, yet if there’s a problem it has nothing to do with the parents. But the truth is, parents don’t raise their children in isolation from society.”
Yes, parents are responsible for their children; no, they did not create the world in which they must parent them.
Our cultural ecology does not support attuned, present, responsive,...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
destabilization begins with stress transmitted to infants still in the womb, with the mechanization of birth, the attenuation of the parenting instinct, and the denial of the child’s developmental needs. It continues with the increasingly intolerable economic and social pressures on parents these days and the erosion of community ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
among the many facets of the socially hazardous environment for child-raising were “violence, poverty and other economic pressures on parents and their children, disruption of relationships, nastiness, despair, depression, paranoia, alienation
Children, like the young of many species, must attach to someone in their lives: their neurophysiology demands it. Absent a reliable attachment figure, they experience fear and disorientation. Their brain wiring will go, well, haywire. In effect, essential brain circuits having to do with capacities such as learning, healthy social interaction, or emotional regulation will not develop appropriately.
For our young today, “whoever is around” from an early age onward is most often the peer group. Unmoored by the decline of the multigenerational adult-led community, children and adolescents have to seek acceptance from one another. This is, developmentally speaking, a fool’s errand.
from the perspective of emotional development, peer orientation—the displacement of adults as the primary source and locus of attachment for the child, in favor of her own age cohort—is disastrous.
In cultures with their priorities in order, young friendships blossom in a community setting, overseen by nurturing adults. In our society, peer interactions occur not in the context of protective adult relationships but away from them.
Left to its own callow devices, the peer group can offer only acceptance that is highly conditional and thus insecure, often demanding self-suppression and conformity in place of true individuality.
“Many children have lost their sadness and disappointment … their feelings of alarm … their feelings of shame and embarrassment. Interestingly enough, research reveals when children lose their blush, they also lose their empathy.
Our emotions are not a luxury but an essential aspect of our makeup. We have them not just for the pleasure of feeling but because they have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us, give us vital information without which we cannot thrive. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth.
The invulnerability imposed by peer orientation imprisons children in their limitations and fears. No wonder so many of them these days are being treated for depression, anxiety, and other disorders.
In the final analysis, the flight from vulnerability is a flight from the self. If we do not hold our children close to us, the ultimate cost is the loss of their ability to hold on to their own truest selves.
“We used to think that schools built brains,” Gordon Neufeld said in Brussels. “Now we know that it is play that builds the brains that school can then use … It’s where growth most happens.”
Free play is one of the “irreducible needs” of childhood, and it’s being sacrificed to both consumerism and the digital culture.
For all our love and dedication as parents and educators, the world in which we must rear children these days undercuts our best efforts in a multitude of ways, all masquerading as “just the way it is.” There is no “just” about it: the consequences are massive. The present, as it presently is, beggars the future.
“Desires are manufactured as surely as are the commodities meant to fulfill them. We consume our needs, unaware that what we take to be a ‘need’ has been artificially produced.”
What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”8
As citizens in ostensibly democratic countries, we have free will, up to a point—but in practice that freedom rarely strays beyond the frontier of what is socially acceptable. Not daring to rock the boat, we risk sinking with it.
As with most chronic conditions, viewing addiction as a dynamic process to be engaged with rather than a demonic force to be feared or battled can ultimately expand the possibilities for healing.
Addictions represent, in their onset, the defenses of an organism against suffering it does not know how to endure. In other words, we are looking at a natural response to unnatural circumstances, an attempt to soothe the pain of injuries incurred in childhood and stresses sustained in adulthood.
I have learned that the first question to ask is not what is wrong with an addiction, but what is “right” about it. What benefit is the person deriving from their habit? What does it do for them? What are they getting that they otherwise can’t access?
“Doc, I don’t know how to tell you this, exactly. It’s like when you’re three years old, sick, shivering with fever, and your mother puts you on her lap, wraps you in a warm blanket, and gives you warm chicken soup—that’s what heroin feels like.”
the British comedian Russell Brand, also spoke of love. “The first time I took heroin, it felt so sacred and spiritual and warm and maternal,” he said. “I felt like I was held … I felt like nothing mattered, and I felt safe.” His use of the word “maternal” is more than metaphorical: it speaks directly to the neurobiology of opiate addiction.
Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, perhaps the world’s best-known former heroin addict, crystallizes this escape strategy in his autobiography, Life: “It was a search for oblivion, I suppose … the convolutions you go through just not to be you for a few hours.”7
Addiction calls to us when waking life amounts to being trapped in inner turmoil, doubt, loss of meaning, isolation, unworthiness; feeling cold in our belly, devoid of hope; lacking faith in the possibility of liberation, missing succor; unable to endure external challenges or the inner chaos or emptiness; incapable of regulating our distressing mind conditions, finding our emotions unendurable; and most of all, desperate to soothe the pain all these states represent.
Are you craving and partaking of something that affords you temporary relief or pleasure, inviting or incurring negative consequences but not giving it up? Welcome to the meeting.
No single addiction gene has ever been found—nor ever will be. There may exist some collection of genes that predisposes people to susceptibility, but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination.
What’s true of physical illness is just as true of addiction: genes are turned on and off by the environment, and we now know that early adversity affects genetic activity in ways that create a template for future dysfunction.
The endorphin system, too, is dependent on supportive, attuned relationships early in life for its development.
The gospel of genetic causation shields us from having to confront our hurts, leaving us all the more at their mercy.
After all, unlike in cancer or rheumatoid arthritis, no physical findings, blood tests, biopsies, radiographs, or scans can either support or rule out psychiatric diagnoses. That statement may surprise many readers, so it bears repeating. There are no measurable physical markers of mental illness other than the subjective (a person’s description of their own mood, say) and the behavioral (sleep patterns, appetite, etc.).
Now, here’s a perhaps surprising assertion: I’m not anti-pharmacology. No one who’s felt or witnessed the beneficial effects of psychiatric drugs can deny that neurobiology must, indeed, play a role in the dynamics and potential easing of mental distress, just as it does in all our experiences. Sometimes the healing of which I just spoke can be helped along—not made to happen, certainly, but assisted—by the intelligent use of these medications. That is not just my professional opinion but my personal experience as well.
That a medication has a certain positive effect reveals nothing about the genesis of a symptom. If aspirin eases a headache, can the headache be explained by an inherited brain deficiency of acetylsalicylic acid, the pill’s active ingredient?
If a shot of bourbon relaxes you, is your tense nervous system suffering from a DNA-dictated whiskey shortage?
Poor quality of care in infancy was, nearly three decades later, associated with a higher volume of the emotionally key brain structure, the hippocampus, as well as with an elevated risk for “borderline personality” features and suicidality. In other words, the brain’s genetics did not “cause” either the “illness” or the neurophysiological differences: all were the result of life experience.
“The evidence of a link between childhood misfortune and future psychiatric disorder is about as strong statistically as the link between smoking and lung cancer,”
“Genes affect how sensitive one is to environment, and environment affects how relevant one’s genetic differences may be,” the leading geneticist R. C. Lewontin has said.
These are the children that Tom Boyce, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, describes as orchids, “exquisitely sensitive to their environment, making them especially vulnerable under conditions of adversity but unusually vital, creative, and successful within supportive, nurturing environments.”
Sensitive people have the potential to be more aware, insightful, inventive, artistic, and empathic, if their sensitivity is not crushed by maltreatment or disdain.
Despite the genetic hoopla in the popular media and all the lavishly funded DNA-hunting in the scientific world, no one has ever identified any gene that causes mental illness, nor any group of genes that code for specific mental health conditions or are required for the presence of mental disorder.
