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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gabor Maté
Read between
February 13 - April 9, 2023
chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.
each of us contains as-yet-unimagined possibilities for wellness, possibilities that reveal themselves only when we face and debunk the misleading myths[*]
French psychologist Pierre Janet
“automatic actions and reactions, sensations and attitudes . . . replayed and reenacted in visceral sensations.”[1]
“All trauma is preverbal,” the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has written.[4]
Trauma pervades our culture, from personal functioning through social relationships, parenting, education, popular culture, economics, and politics. In fact, someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society.
We are closer to the truth when we ask: Where do we each fit on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been? And what possibilities would open up were we to become more familiar, even intimate, with them?
“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you” is how I formulate it.
D. W. Winnicott referred to as “nothing happening when something might profitably have happened”—a
What the two types share is succinctly summarized by Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
We each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of others.
Therefore, if the circumstances dictate that these natural, healthy impulses (to defend or run away) must be quelled, their gut-level cues—the feelings themselves—will have to be suppressed as well.
“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.
I could only sigh: self-assaulting shame so easily moonlights as personal responsibility.
Wolynn is the author of the aptly titled It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle.
Socrates: “An unexamined life is not worth living. As long as one doesn’t examine oneself, one is completely subject to whatever one is wired to do, but once you become aware that you have choices, you can exercise those choices.”
In a 1939 lecture to a graduating medical class, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA), Dr. Soma Weiss informed his audience that “social and psychic factors play a role in every disease, but in many conditions, they represent dominant influences.”[13]
Like its cousin, the pain response, stress is a mandatory survival function for any living being.
“allostasis”
combination of the Greek words allo, for “variable,” and stasis, for “standing” or “stoppage”; combined, we have something like “staying the same amid change.”
Even a healthy ego is convinced of its separateness,
Our biology itself is interpersonal.
Given their vulnerability and dependence, children’s physiology is especially susceptible to the emotional states of their caregivers.
Young kids’ stress hormone levels, for example, are heavily influenced by the emotional atmosphere in the home, whether outright conflict or bristling tension.[9]
the lethal effect of deficient interpersonal relationships is comparable to such risk factors as smoking and alcohol, and even exceeds the dangers posed by physical inactivity and obesity.[16]
The mechanisms of epigenetics include, among myriad others, adding certain molecules to DNA sequences so as to change gene function, modifying the numbers of receptors for certain messenger chemicals, and influencing the interactions between genes.[*]
Experience, in other words, determines how our genetic potential expresses itself in the end.
Dr. Szyf and his team in Montreal performed one of the most cited epigenetic studies,
The study showed the quality of early maternal care to have a causal impact on the offspring’s brains’ biochemical capacity to respond to stress in a healthy way into adulthood.
Much like gene expression, telomeres manifest the vagaries of fate and history, class and race, stress and trauma.
What epigenetics taught us is that social changes are really not different than chemical changes.” The one is manifested in the other.
Although often disruptive and highly distressing, autoimmune symptoms can be nebulous and hard to pinpoint at first—not
Across many Western countries, rates of everything from celiac disease to IBD, from lupus to type 1 diabetes, and even allergies, are steadily rising, stymieing researchers.[2]
Virginia Ladd,
“The rapid increase in autoimmune diseases . . . clearly suggests that environmental factors are at play.”[6]
In effect, with no conscious outlet and lacking resolution, Mee Ok’s inflamed emotions rebelled, manifesting in the inflammation of her tissues.
a major review of the literature presented at an international conference in Portugal in 2013 found a host of patterns among MS patients, including
Disease is an outcome of generations of suffering, of social conditions, of cultural conditioning, of childhood trauma, of physiology bearing the brunt of people’s stresses and emotional histories,
“A disease is not like a thing. It is energy flow, it’s a current; it is evolution or devolution that occurs when you’re not awake and connected, and trauma is essentially ruling your life.
What if we saw illness as an imbalance in the entire organism, not just as a manifestation of molecules, cells, or organs invaded or denatured by pathology?
Returning to cancer, the work of Dr. Cole and colleagues has shown that activation of the body’s stress response can promote tumor growth and spread.
One of the things many diseases have in common is inflammation, acting as kind of a fertilizer for the development of illness. We’ve discovered that when people feel threatened, insecure—especially over an extended period of time—our bodies are programmed to turn on inflammatory genes.”
Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not. —János (Hans) Selye, M.D., The Stress of Life
In 1987 the psychologist Dr. Lydia Temoshok[*] proposed what became known as the “type C personality,” referring to traits strongly associated with the onset of malignancy.[*]
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.
Attachment,
is the drive for closeness—proximity to others, in not only the physical but the emotional sense as well.
authenticity.
knowing our gut feelings when they arise and honoring them.
