Scattered Minds Quotes

“The common theme on all days, good or bad, is a gnawing sense of having missed out on something important in life.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The second nearly ubiquitous characteristic of ADD is impulsiveness of word or deed, with poorly controlled emotional reactivity.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“to be able to focus, the person with ADD needs a much higher level of motivation than do other people.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Within minutes following birth, the mother’s odors stimulate the branching of millions of nerve cells in the newborn’s brain. A six-day-old infant can already distinguish the scent of his mother from that of other women. Later on, visual inputs associated with emotions gradually take over as the major influences.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The right hemisphere of the mother’s brain, the side where our unconscious emotions reside, programs the infant’s right hemisphere. In the early months, the most important communications between mother and infant are unconscious ones. Incapable of deciphering the meaning of words, the infant receives messages that are purely emotional. They are conveyed by the mother’s gaze, her tone of voice and her body language, all of which reflect her unconscious internal emotional environment. Anything that threatens the mother’s emotional security may disrupt the developing electrical wiring and chemical supplies of the infant brain’s emotion-regulating and attention-allocating systems.*”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Parents of an ADD child will often say that their son or daughter has a “powerful” personality. Far from being powerful, the child is weak and vulnerable. It’s not his “power” but the inefficiency of the parents’ own emotional thermostat that enables the fluctuations in the child’s moods to set the emotional tone of the whole household. A child in this situation is deeply insecure. He is made insecure by his lack of emotional self-control because there are no adults around able to maintain a steady and functioning environment, whatever his own particular internal states may be.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“As I will discuss in a later chapter on relationships, couples choose each other with an unerring instinct for finding the very person who will exactly match their own level of unconscious anxieties and mirror their own dysfunctions, and who will trigger for them all their unresolved emotional pain.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“For a person with ADD, tuning out is an automatic brain activity that originated during the period of rapid brain development in infancy when there was emotional hurt combined with helplessness.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The erosion of community, the breakdown of the extended family, the pressures on marriage relationships, the harried lives of nuclear families still intact and the growing sense of insecurity even in the midst of relative wealth have all combined to create an emotional milieu in which calm, attuned parenting is becoming alarmingly difficult.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American identity. “This dynamic country,” he wrote, “subjects its inhabitants to more extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a generation than is normally the case with other great nations.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense—rightly or wrongly—that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers.[6] The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his. . . Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“the formation of the child’s brain circuits is influenced by the mother’s emotional states, I believe that ADD originates in stresses that affect the mothering parent’s emotional interactions with the infant. They cause the disrupted electrical and chemical circuitry of ADD. Attachment and attunement, two crucial aspects of the infant-parent relationship, are the determining factors.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness—we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge—there is also no deprivation or anxiety”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Of all environments, the one that most profoundly shapes the human personality is the invisible one: the emotional atmosphere in which the child lives during the critical early years of brain development. The invisible environment has little to do with parenting philosophies or parenting style. It is a matter of intangibles, foremost among them being the parents’ relationship with each other and their emotional balance as individuals. These, too, can vary significantly from the birth of one child to the arrival of another. Psychological tension in the parents’ lives during the child’s infancy is, I am convinced, a major and universal influence on the subsequent emergence of ADD.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“love felt by the parent does not automatically translate into loving experienced by the child.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Children are a great incentive and impetus for parents to learn about themselves, about each other and about life itself. Unfortunately, much of the learning may occur at their expense.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“La curación no es un acontecimiento, no es un acto único. Se produce mediante un proceso; está en el proceso mismo.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“El camino fácil de confiar en una píldora es tentador, pero conduce a la dirección equivocada. Mucho más difícil, y mucho más esencial, es abordar las cuestiones de seguridad psicológica, las relaciones familiares, el estilo de vida y la autoestima.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“Los fármacos, por supuesto, no alteran los principales problemas a los que se tiene que enfrentar una persona.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“At times I have wished that the “experts” and media pundits who deny the existence of attention deficit disorder could meet only a few of the severely affected adults who have sought my help. These men and women, in their thirties, forties and fifties, have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Some have never been able to read a book from cover to cover, some cannot even sit through a movie.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The British psychiatrist R. D. Laing wrote somewhere that there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people and their own minds.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“I felt I had discovered what it was that had always kept me from attaining psychological integrity: wholeness, the reconciliation and joining together of the disharmonious fragments of my mind.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Nos sentimos inexorablemente atraídos a casarnos con el individuo que es, de entre todas las parejas potenciales, la que más probabilidades tenga de desencadenar en nosotros los recuerdos implícitos más dolorosos y confusos, así como los más cálidos y felices.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“El modo de tratar el cuerpo y la psique dice mucho de la autoestima de la persona: maltratar el cuerpo o el alma con sustancias químicas nocivas, las conductas perjudiciales, la sobrecarga de trabajo, la falta de tiempo y espacio personal son aspectos que denotan una baja autoestima.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“El ego frágil que se rechaza a sí mismo es incapaz de soportar todo aquello que le recuerde su falibilidad.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“El hecho de que otras personas no son las que provocan nuestras reacciones es un concepto difícil de asumir,”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“Podemos creer que tenemos una idea perfecta de por qué actúan como lo hacen, pero en realidad nuestras creencias no reflejan más que nuestras propias ansiedades.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“Un error que cometemos muchos de nosotros en nuestras relaciones con los demás, ya sea con nuestros hijos o con nuestros cónyuges, con conocidos o desconocidos, es imaginar que conocemos las intenciones que hay detrás de sus acciones. Es un error que algunos psicólogos denominan «pensamiento intencional».”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas

“los circuitos de la razón y la emoción están estrechamente conectados, por lo que las relaciones problemáticas conducen directamente a dificultades en el procesamiento cerebral.”
― Gabor Maté, Mentes dispersas