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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gabor Maté
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April 14 - June 19, 2024
The great twentieth-century British psychiatrist and psychologist John Bowlby was familiar with such behavior: he called it detachment. At his clinic he observed ten small children who had to endure prolonged separation from their parents due to uncontrollable circumstances. “On meeting mother for the first time after days or weeks away every one of the children showed some degree of detachment,” Bowlby observed. “Two seemed not to recognize mother. The other eight turned away or even walked away from her. Most of them
either cried or came close to tears; a number alternated between a tearful and expressionless face.”[3] It may seem counterintuitive, but this reflexive rejection of the loving mother is an adaptation: “I was so hurt when you abandoned me,” says the young child’s mind, “that I will not reconnect with you. I don’t dare open myself to that pain again.” In many children—and I was certainly one—early reactions like these become embedded in the nervous system,
Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.
An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists. Much in life, including in art and/or social intercourse or politics, may be upsetting, distressing, even very painful without being newly traumatic.
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight,” wrote the psychologist Rollo May.[12] Trauma robs us of that freedom.
“with a chronic depression that began when I was about 10, but instead of killing my will, it motivated me: I thought if I could be good enough at whatever task, great or small, that was before me, I might have a few minutes of happiness.”[14] That conviction of one’s inadequacy has fueled a great many glittering careers and instigated many instances of illness, often both in the same individual.
If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma. Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations.
called “superautonomous self-sufficiency,”[*] which means exactly what it sounds like: an exaggerated and outsize aversion to asking anything of anyone.
In a previous British study at King’s College Hospital in London, it had also been shown that women with cancerous breast lumps characteristically exhibited “extreme suppression of anger and of other feelings” in “a significantly higher proportion” than the control group, which was made up of women admitted for biopsy at the same time but found to have benign breast tumors.[3]
Women with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were found to have twice the risk of ovarian cancer as women with no known trauma exposure.[10] The
“Now keep your hands up,” I continue, “if these specialists asked you about your childhood stresses or traumas, your relationship with your parents, the quality of your current relationships, your degree of loneliness or companionship, your job satisfaction and how you relate to work, how you feel about your boss or how your boss treats you, your experience of joy or anger, any present stresses, or how you feel about yourself as a person.”
Along similar lines, Australian researchers found that a bad job is worse for mental health than being out of work.[15] So the next time a co-worker complains to you, “This job is killing me,” you can tell them they may be right.
Considered one of Canada’s worst-ever natural disasters, the storm left many Quebecers without heat or electricity. The more “objective stress” that pregnant women had to live through during those trying
days—as in concrete, measurable factors like darkness, cold, and home damage[*]—the more their kids’ physiology was marked by that adversity even near puberty. (The participants were of a similar socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic background, and lived in the same suburban area.) “Over the years [of tracking the children],” Suzanne King, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University said, “we found that that objective stress explained how kids varied one from another in a whole host of things: language, BMI [body mass index] and obesity, insulin secretion, their immune system.”[6] Even IQ
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overdriven, externally focused multitasking hyper-responsibility, based on the conviction that one must justify one’s existence by doing and giving;
harboring and compulsively acting out two beliefs: “I am responsible for how other people feel” and “I must never disappoint anyone.”
personality. Someone who is not valued or recognized for who she is early in life may develop an outsize appetite for status or wealth.
If our society were truly to appreciate the significance of children’s emotional ties throughout the first years of life, it would no longer tolerate children growing up, or parents having to struggle, in situations that cannot possibly nourish healthy growth. —Stanley Greenspan, M.D., The Growth of the Mind[*]
The Cree word wétiko (with variants in other Native languages such as Ojibwa and Powhatan) refers to a creature, spirit, or mindset of greed and domination that cannibalizes people and drives them to exploit and terrorize others. (Strikingly, in the Quechua language of the
As Dr. Gordon Neufeld told a session of the European Parliament in Brussels, “The unfolding of human potential is spontaneous but not inevitable . . . We all grow older, but we don’t all grow up. To truly ‘raise’ a child, then, would be to bring that child to his or her full potential as a human being.”[7] So why, in our modern culture, do we chronically miss that goal? The problem begins with the failure to grasp the needs of the developing child.
1. The attachment relationship: children’s deep sense of contact and connection with those responsible for them.
2. A sense of attachment security that allows the child to rest from the work of earning his right to be who he is and as he is.
3. Permission to feel one’s emotions, especially grief, anger, sadness, and pain—in other words, the safety to remain vulnerable.
“Paternal depression is also known to affect sperm quality, have epigenetic effects on the DNA of the baby,
and can also affect placenta function,” one of the researchers pointed out.
We’ve all lost our children . . . Just look at them, for God’s sake—violent in the streets, comatose in the malls, narcotized in front of the TV. In my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us. —Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter
Think about it: even if you’ve never called an infant “dignified,” odds are you’ve met quite a few indignant ones. The word is not figurative, either. Even babies—perhaps they especially—know when their physical and emotional integrity is being ignored or violated.
But at least I’m aware that guilt and blame are unhelpful and beside the point, especially when we understand the context. As James Garbarino urged in 1995, “We need to put aside blaming parents and take a good hard look at the challenge of raising children in a socially toxic environment.”[1]
As meticulously documented as it is shocking, Bakan’s book depicts the multiple ways corporations deploy a sophisticated and sinister understanding of children’s emotional needs to generate profit. Here the manipulation has been, and continues to be, very conscious indeed. In 1983 corporations spent $100 million in direct advertising to children. Less than three decades later, that figure had shot up to $15 billion.[*]
“The average child in the United States watches 30,000 television advertisements a year—most of which pitch products directly to them . . . and all conveying a series of subtle, and corrosive, messages: that they will find happiness through their relationships with products—with things, not people;
Lindstrom’s understanding of the child’s mind, as summarized by Bakan, is alarmingly on point: “Emotions drive everything for children . . . and marketers, to be successful, must engage the most fundamental emotions at the deepest level. Love, which connotes nurturing, affection, and romance, is one of these fundamental emotions . . . Fear—as in violence, terror, horror, cruelty, and war—is another. Then there is mastery, kids’ aspiration to gain independence from adults.” (Italics in original.) This deft analysis is not intended to help the child’s mind develop toward health, dignity, genuine
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“We’re seeing autistic-like characteristics in children without autism,” she told me. “Lack of smile response, delayed verbal skills. [The ones] I used to affectionately call ‘busy children’ [are now] just kids that are kind of running around aimlessly or conversely zombified when they’re not on the tech . . . You have kids—for that matter, adults now—that are used to being on the tech for extensive periods of time.
launched iPad. Is it all bad news? Of course not; nothing is that simple. Ellen Friedrichs, a Brooklyn-based health educator who works with a diverse array of young people, notes that for some of her students, “the internet has been a lifeline. For that queer kid living in some small town, in a religious community where they have to sit through a homophobic sermon every Sunday . . . you can go online and find ‘your people’ in a way that you never could.”
“And?” you might ask. “What’s wrong with well-deserved kudos?” It turns out that there’s praise, and then there’s praise. 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. It’s yet another barrier to the emergence of a healthy self.
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.
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. Free coffee in the back.
Contrary to what I, too, used to believe, a diagnosis like ADHD or depression or bipolar illness explains nothing. No diagnosis ever does. Diagnoses are abstractions, or summaries: sometimes helpful, always incomplete.
“So, do you think people should focus on the emotional content of delusions and try to understand them?” Caterina asked me as we wrapped up. “Do you think that’s a way of healing, rather than medicating them?” “It’s not necessarily a question of rather than,” I suggested. “If you weren’t on medication, you’d not be able to have this conversation right now. My
problem with the usual approach is not that doctors give medication; only, too often, that’s all they do.”
What, in our society, are the most widespread emotional triggers for stress? My own observations of self and others have led me to endorse fully what a review of the stress literature concluded, namely that “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.”[3] A society that breeds these conditions, as capitalism inevitably does, is a superpowered generator of stressors that tax human health.
In fact, multiple job losses have been shown to raise the risk of heart attacks as much as cigarettes, alcohol, and hypertension.[18]
He points to four central principles of what he calls ACC—American corporate capitalism: it “fosters and encourages a set of values based on self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition.”[13]
There is a seesaw oscillation, Tim found, between materialistic concerns on the one hand and prosocial values like empathy, generosity, and cooperation on the other: the more the former are elevated, the lower the latter descend.
anyone requires a second opinion, the New York psychoanalyst Steven Reisner is ready with one.[*] “Narcissism and sociopathy describe corporate America,” he told me. “But it’s flat-out wrong to think in twenty-first-century America that narcissism and sociopathy are illnesses. In today’s America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies. And they’re very successful strategies, especially in business and politics and entertainment.”
In the logic of profit, greed is creed, and health nothing but collateral damage. “It’s not that they want you to die,” the endocrinologist Rob Lustig told me in a tone of mock reassurance. “They only want your money. They just don’t care if it kills you.”
This is what the American psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton has termed “malignant normality.” Many of the greatest crimes have been and continue to be perpetrated by people in leadership positions who are deemed to be the epitome of normal in their respective societies, whether it’s the production of toxic and climate-altering chemicals or, say, the imposition of policies that lead to mass starvation in countries far away.
