Gabor Mate

In many children—and I was certainly one—early reactions like these become embedded in the nervous system, mind, and body, playing havoc with future relationships.

The home becomes a place where we unwittingly re-create, as I did, scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small.

Hans Selye in The Stress of Life.1

The idea that people’s emotional coping style can be a factor in scleroderma or other chronic conditions is anathema to some physicians.

It was evident that he found the prospect of Alexa’s death unbearably frightening, and also that she appeared to deny the diagnosis m

like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.

excess of painful, unmetabolized emotion.

Hans Selye in The Stress of Life

Action has meaning only in relationship and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.

“It would be nice to get a break from myself at least for a little while,”