Excerpts from Gabor & Daniel Mate’s ‘The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture’ pg 432-end:
- “There is an unhealthy kind of guilt: a chronic conviction that we are innately blameworthy and should expect, or even deserve, punishment or reproach. In this dim light our faults and failings become evidence of our irredeemable lowliness rather than invitations to grow and do better. This type of guilt, or the fear of it, often strangles a robust “no,” smothering self-assertion: the prospect of others’ disapproval or disappointment triggers the intolerable conviction that we are bad, wrong, inexcusable.” pg 432
- “Most chronic guilt is obsessively single-minded, knowing only one stimulus and exactly one response.” pg 434
- “Guilt speaks in the voice of tightly coiled implicit memory circuits, making it incapable of and impervious to reason. It can’t help being there, and we cannot get rid of it by force. Even by obeying its dictates we shake it off only temporarily--it is sure to raise its clamor again soon. Our acquiescence, and our trap, derives from the fact that we fear guilt, loathe it, are eager to be rid of it. Yes, I’ll comply, we plead. Anything to make you go away. Recognizing guilt for the well-meaning friend it is--doggedly faithful to a fault--we can make room for it. Engaging it in cordial conversation without believing its self-devaluing message, we realize we are talking to a very young and innocent creature.” pg 434
- “When we give guilt a seat at the table, it no longer needs to ransack the entire house.” pg 435
- “Unless their emotional distress can be shared with and validated by attuned adults, children’s necessary developmental narcissism disposes them to take everything personally. It is natural that they should believe that when bad things happen--when life hurts them, when the environment is stressed, the parents unhappy or ill--it is because they are incapable, unworthy, defective.” pg 436
- “Acknowledging that those on whom one depends are incapable of meeting one’s needs would be a devastating blow to a young person. Thus self-blame, like guilt, is an unflagging protector. Believing that the deficiency is ours gives us at least a modicum of agency and hope: maybe, if we just work hard enough, we can earn the love and care we need.” pg 437
- “When you are no longer looking at things from the perspective of the ‘I,’ you feel a newly released potential and sense of connection.” pg 460
- “Healing is outside the thinking mind’s wheelhouse.” pg 464
- “Society is against essence. Everybody around you, wherever you go, is trying to fill holes, and people feel very threatened if you don’t try to fill yours the same way.” pg 468
- “The point is not the big aha, but the arising--sudden or gradual, however it comes--of the consciousness that holds the mind but doesn’t mistake itself for its contents.” pg 468
- “These nonrational parts of ourselves know things about human potential and the nature of life that are untouchable by even the smartest intellect.” pg 482
