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Addiction-and-recovery Quote by Gabor Maté

““What [my patients] care about is my presence or absence as a human being. They gauge with unerring eye whether I am grounded enough on any given day to co-exist with them, to listen to them as persons with feelings, hopes and aspirations as valid as mine. They can tell instantly whether I’m genuinely committed to their well-being or just trying to get them out of my way.””

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Addiction-and-recovery Dreams Hope Patience

More by Gabor Maté

“As parents who make every effort we can to raise our children in loving security, we do not need to feel more guilt than…

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“The fact is, we in this society are often quite removed from our own emotional reality.”

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“Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs…

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“Many adults have not attained maturity — have not mastered being independent, self-motivated individuals capable of tending their own emotional needs and of respecting the needs of others. Among the several reasons why maturity is less and less prevalent today, peer orientation is probably the main culprit. Immaturity and peer orientation go hand in hand. The earlier the onset of…

Autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything.

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“If a mother has eight children, there are eight mothers. This is not simply because of the fact that the mother was different in…

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“Without attachment, the parent succeeds at most in cowing a child into obedience, at the price of grave damage to the relationship and to…

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“Attachment is our connection with the world. In the earliest attachment relationships, we gain or lose the ability to stay open, self-nurturing and healthy. In those early attachment bonds, we learned to experience anger or to fear it and repress it. There we developed our sense of autonomy or suffered its atrophy. Connection is also vital to healing. Study after…

“So what you've actually got is traumatized children. When children are traumatized that affects how they feel about themselves, which is deeply ashamed because a child always believe that it is about himself. So if I am being hurt like this, I got to be a terrible person. Or.. if I was sexually abused, why didn't I fight back, I…

“Even without world wars, revolutions and emigration, siblings growing up in the same home almost never share the same environment. More accurately, brothers and sisters share some environments — usually the less important ones — but they rarely share the one single environment that has the most powerful impact on personality formation. They may live in the same house, eat…

“We think that there are people who are normal over here, and then there’s the pathological ones who have depression, anxiety, addiction or schizophrenia or Bipolar disorder or ADHD or any number of other conditions. What I see is a continuum; that we are all on a continuum. These traits to one degree or another are present in almost everybody.…

“One cannot get much more vulnerable than to expose oneself psychologically. To share oneself with another and then be misunderstood or rejected is, for…

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Explore all 244 Gabor Maté quotes

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“As I listened to the other addicts share their life experiences, I began to hear the story of my own life, told in a hundred different voices. I heard from people who’d had some of the same painful childhood experiences as me, which had led them into the same unmanageable behaviors and compulsions. I heard from people who, just like…

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