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Famous Gabor Maté Quotes

“She had an awfully huge void to fill in your life all of a sudden, right from the beginning of her life. The nature of stress is not always the usual stuff that people think of. It's not the external stress of war or money loss or somebody dying, it is actually the internal stress of having to adjust oneself to somebody else. Cancer and ALS and MS and rheumatoid arthritis and all these other conditions, it seems to me, happen to people who have a poor sense of themselves as independent persons. On the emotional level, that is- they can be highly accomplished in the arts or intellectually- but on an emotional level they have a poorly differentiated sense of self. They live in reaction to others without ever really sensing who they themselves are.”

EmotionPsychologyStress
Book:When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
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“Equally essential is a nourishing emotional connection, in particular the quality of attunement. Attunement, a process in which the parent is "tuned in" to the child's emotional needs, is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive but easily subverted when the parent is stressed or distracted emotionally, financially or for any other reason. Attunement may also be absent if the parent never received it in his or her childhood. Strong attachment and love exist in many parent-child relationships but without attunement. Children in non-attuned relationships, may feel loved but on a deeper level do not experience themselves as being appreciated for who they really are. They learn to present only their "acceptable" side to the parent, repressing emotional responses the parent rejects and learning to reject themselves for even having such responses”

EmotionPsychologyAttachmentRepression
Book:When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
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“A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases... is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs. If we would heal, it is essential to begin the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life. Whatever external treatment is administered, the healing agent lies within. The internal milieu must be changed. To find health, and to know it fully, necessitates a quest, a journey to the center of our own biology of belief. That means rethinking and recognizing—re-cognizing: literally, to “know again”—our lives.”

HealingHealthMind Body Connection
Book:When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
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“Not every story has a happy ending, ... but the discoveries of science, the teachings of the heart, and the revelations of the soul all assure us that no human being is ever beyond redemption. The possibility of renewal exists so long as life exists. How to support that possibility in others and in ourselves is the ultimate question.”

HopeRedemption
Book:In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
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“The world is much more ready to accept someone who is different and comfortable with it than someone desperately seeking to conform by denying himself. It's the self-rejection others react against, much more than the differentness. So the solution for the adult is not to "fit in," but to accept his inability to conform. The child's uniqueness has to first find a welcome in the heart of the parent. None of this is achieved by an act of will, and it is possible one will not succeed completely. That is not important. What is important is to engage in the process, difficult as that is. Healing is not an event, not a single act. It occurs by a process; it is in the process itself.”

RelationshipsHealingWellness
Book:Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
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“Your book humanizes the addict,' many readers have told me. That acknowledgement reflects a fundamental and common misperception. Addicts *are* human. What keeps many of us from seeing that? It is only the habit of our egocentric mind that divides the world into 'us' and 'them.' More precisely, it is our inability-or refusal-to see the *us* in 'them' and the *them* in what we take to be 'us.' Such failure of imagination is seen in every realm, from personal relationships to international politics. Simply put, it reflects that clinging to identity that is our way of belonging to a group. And if we identify with a group of any dimension narrower than all humanity, there must then be *others* who, by definition, do *not* belong and to whom, we may believe at least unconsciously, we are superior. That superiority makes us feel entitled to judge, and to remain indifferent.”

Psychology
Book:In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
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“No human being is empty or deficient at the core, but many live as if they were and experience themselves as primarily that way. Attempting to obliterate the sense of deficiency and emptiness that is a core state of any addict is like laboring to fill in a canyon with shovelfuls of dust. Energy devoted to such an endless and futile task is robbed from one’s psychological and spiritual growth, from genuinely soul-satisfying pursuits, and from the ones we love.”

PsychologyAddictionEmptinessDrugsSocialization
Book:In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
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“Two days after the German occupation, my mother called the pediatrician. "Would you come to see Gabi?" she requested. "He has been crying almost without stop since yesterday morning." "I'll come, of course," the doctor replied, "but I should tell you: all of my Jewish babies are crying.”

PsychologyHolocaust
Book:Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
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“As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.”

ParentingAddictionAttachmentHomeschoolingChild DevelopmentSocialization
Book:In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
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“I hope people will listen to this interview in a very personal sense, and that this discussion with you will help people look at themselves in maybe a new way. So rather than self-judgment about stuff that went wrong or they did to themselves or others, they get curious. What made me do that? They get curious compassionately because we're all born just wanting to be loving and loved. And then something happens. And then it's a hard road back. But I hope that this conversation helps people reconnect with that path or encourage them to continue that.”

InterviewTimFerriss
Author:Gabor Maté
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