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if you go through life being stressed while not knowing you are stressed, there is little you can do to protect yourself from the long-term physiological consequences.
the suppression group showed heightened activation of their sympathetic, or fight-or-flight, nervous system: in other words, a stress response.
“small-t” trauma expressed in a disconnection from the self even in the absence of abuse or overwhelming threat.
many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves,
But there is no culpability where there is no choice.
No conceivable condition exists under which a human being has less agency or fewer options than in infancy and early childhood.
early experience molds behaviors, emotional patterns, unconscious beliefs, learning styles, relational dynamics, and the ability to handle stress and regulate ourselves.
the quality of early caregiving is heavily, even decisively, determined by the societal context in which it takes place.
The child doesn’t have to do anything, or be any different, to win that love—in fact, cannot do anything, because this abiding embrace cannot be earned, nor can it be revoked.
3. Permission to feel one’s emotions, especially grief, anger, sadness, and pain—in other words, the safety to remain vulnerable.
blame is neither helpful nor remotely justified. We are all doing our best.
In those words we hear the second factor determining the quality of women’s experience: safety and support.
If it takes a world to raise a child, it takes a toxic culture to make us forget how to.
There is no way that your prefrontal cortex will permanently adopt patterns that will translate into adulthood. No way. If that would be the case, then the last 3 generations to rule this earth (boomers, pre-boomers, Generation X) would have all been emotionally unstable and plagued with psychological issues.” “Well, then,” I thought to myself, “I rest my case.”
Troubled parenting, in turn, is a breeding ground for personal and societal malaise.
A wiser view requires a wider lens. Yes, parents are responsible for their children; no, they did not create the world in which they must parent them.
guilt and blame are unhelpful and beside the point, especially when we understand the context.
children and adolescents have to seek acceptance from one another. This is, developmentally speaking, a fool’s errand.
his peer orientation was not about his peers per se: it was a natural outcome of his parents’ lack of availability as emotionally attuned adults in his early years.
“The phone,” she told me, “has been designed by the world’s top neuroscientists and psychologists, who have taken all of our most sophisticated brain research and understanding of human motivation and reward cycles and have embedded it into devices.”
those who can’t get enough of what they don’t need but feel they must have.
found increased screen time associated with poorer white-brain-matter functioning
Developmental psychologists agree that praising a child’s effort is helpful and promotes self-esteem, while valuing the achievement only programs kids to keep seeking external approval—not for who they are but for what they do, for what others demand of them.
all masquerading as “just the way it is.” There is no “just” about it: the consequences are massive.
“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”
what is considered normal and natural are established not by what is good for people, but by what is expected of them,
excessive identification with socially imposed duty, role, and responsibility at the expense of one’s own needs can jeopardize health.
encouraging people to perform tasks even if chronically stressful, under circumstances they might naturally want to avoid.
I needed to be needed, wanted, and admired as a substitute for love.
the social character hatched by our consumerist society confuses desire with need,
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.
studies have shown that repeated drug use leads to long-lasting changes in the brain that undermine voluntary control.”
significantly compromised, even as the circuits of reward and motivation become trained on the desired drugs. In this sense, the brain does become an impaired organ, with diminished capacity to make rational choices, obsessively intent instead on satisfying the addictive drives.
Addictions represent, in their onset, the defenses of an organism against suffering it does not know how to endure.
What are they getting that they otherwise can’t access?
all addiction’s incentives can be summed up as an escape from the confines of the self, by which I mean the mundane, lived-in experience of being uncomfortable and isolated in one’s own skin.
that alienated discomfort can be disturbing to the point of torment: a persistent sense of being abnormal, unworthy, and deficient.
Why would the self need to be escaped? We long for escape when we are imprisoned, when we are suffering.
only a person in pain craves anesthesia.
Ask not why the addiction, but why the pain.
downtrodden
Addiction is a complex psychological, emotional, physiological, neurobiological, social, and spiritual process. It manifests through any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but that in the long term causes them or others negative consequences, and yet the person refuses or is unable to give it up. Accordingly, the three main hallmarks of addiction are short-term relief or pleasure and therefore craving; long-term suffering for oneself or others; and an inability to stop.
The issue is never the external target but one’s internal relationship to it.
All kinds of suffering, from the less obvious developmental wounds we have called small-t to the more overt big-T traumas, can cry out for addictive pain relief.
trauma/injury is about what happens inside us, and how those effects persist, not what happens to us.
addiction is a kind of refugee story: from intolerable feelings incurred through adversity and never processed, and into a state of temporary freedom, even if illusory.
“It is commonly believed,” Felitti said, discussing his research, “that repeated use of many street drugs will in itself produce addiction. Our findings challenge those views . . . Addiction has relatively little to do with the supposed addictive properties of certain substances, other than their all providing a desirable psychoactive relief . . . In other words, this is an understandable attempt at self-treatment with something that almost works, thus creating a drive for further doses.”[2]
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.
studies have both confirmed that any genetic risks for substance abuse can be offset by being reare...
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