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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gabor Maté
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February 13 - April 9, 2023
What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel?
If the choice is between “hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need” and “being myself and going without,” I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel.
Inauthenticity is thereafter misidentified with survival because the two were synonymous during the formative years—or, at least, seemed so to our young selves.
It is sobering to realize that 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, way back when.
Vincent Felitti’s astute remark about addiction that “it’s hard to get enough of something that almost works.”
We are compelled to persevere in seeking those external sources of fleeting relief, only to have to replenish them once the thrill is gone.
No conceivable condition exists under which a human being has less agency or fewer options than in infancy and early childhood. The imperative to survive overrides everything, and that survival depends on the maintenance of attachment, at whatever cost to authenticity.
There is a tendency in this culture, whether with approval or dismay, to see people as inherently aggressive, acquisitive, and ruggedly individualistic.
our miraculous talent for adaptation could also be a liability.
We, too, have needs the environment must satisfy if we are to flourish.
Stephen Porges, one of our inherent needs is reciprocity, to be attuned with—“well
children are increasingly set upon by an accumulation of potent influences—social, economic, and cultural—that overwhelm and, in many ways, subjugate their internal emotional apparatus to imperatives that have nothing to do with well-being;
Neufeld
“Children must feel an invitation to exist in our presence, exactly the way they are.”
Where does a sense of security come from? Once again, warm, attuned interactions with caregivers are the key ingredient.
“When our brains are undercared for,” writes Darcia Narvaez, “they become more stress-reactive and subject to dominance by our survival systems—fear, panic, rage.”
the child’s expression of feelings cannot threaten the attachment relationship with the parents.
By banishing feelings from awareness, we merely send them underground, a locked cellar of emotions that will continue to haunt many lives.
there is evidence suggesting that maternal mind states during pregnancy and postpartum shape the very structure of the infant’s developing brain.
Remember telomeres, the chromosomal markers of health and aging? These structures were shown to be shorter—that is, more prematurely aged—in twenty-five-year-old adults whose mothers had undergone major stress during pregnancy.[10]
We all need to realize that entering a pregnancy should be like entering a shrine, a sacred place and time: a baby is being built.
As the poet Adrienne Rich put it in her book Of Woman Born: “In order for all women to have real choices all along the line, we need fully to understand the power and powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture.”
Suppression of innate knowledge is one of medicine’s unfortunate tendencies.
A person’s body seizes up in the absence of safety and emotional connection, especially under the effect of sensitizing hormones. Oblivious to the woman’s needs for silence, safety, and attunement, hospitals create a self-perpetuating cycle, instigating many of the labor complications they then must intervene to resolve.
the struggle to be “good parents” can seem like a protracted battle against time, against ourselves, even against our kids.
If it takes a world to raise a child, it takes a toxic culture to make us forget how to.
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.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,
the American Academy of Pediatrics, having reviewed nearly one hundred studies, issued a statement in 2018
It called for the end of spanking and of harsh verbal punishment of children and adolescents.
This is particularly the case in the United States, where fewer than 20 percent of new mothers have access to paid leave.
While there is no sense in pining for some idealized once-upon-a-time, a decline in cohesion and community support is discernible, and lamentable. “In earlier decades, the social ties were in place,”
A culture where Nature has become the exception is a culture in trouble.
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.
the process culminates in the exploitation of children and youth for the glory of the consumer market.
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]
An automatic consequence of the weakening of communal and family ties is that our kids must seek their attachment needs elsewhere.
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.
The World Health Organization estimated in 2012 that one-third of children report having been bullied by their peers.[5]
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 tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth.
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.
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.
In 1983 corporations spent $100 million in direct advertising to children. Less than three decades later, that figure had shot up to $15 billion.[*]
That Facebook (recently rebranded as “Meta”), through its Instagram brand, has knowingly marketed programs that harm the mental health of teenage girls is only the latest revelation of the corporate assault on children’s minds.[10]
Dopamine, as we will see, is the essential chemical in the addiction process, whether to substances or behaviors.
The study, conducted with preschoolers by means of advanced brain imaging, found increased screen time associated with poorer white-brain-matter functioning “in major fiber tracts supporting core language and emergent literary skills.”[12]
As in marketing, the people who invent and propagate these technologies are conscious of the problematic nature of their wares, and even take it to heart—when it comes to their own children, that is.
Play is a primary engine of brain development and is also essential to the emotional maturation process.
