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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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“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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