Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
Gabor Maté
Top 10 Best Quotes
“So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable.”
“The best attitude to adopt is one of compassionate patience, which has to include a tolerance for failure.”
“The addiction is the repeated behavior engaged in despite the certainty that it harms oneself or others.”
“Given their automatic tuning out, ADD children forever find themselves being told to “pay attention”—a demand that completely misunderstands both the nature of the child and the nature of attention. The obvious monetary connotation of “pay” is that attention is something the child owes the adult, that the child’s attention belongs to the adult by right. The phrase takes for granted that being attentive is always a consciously chosen act, subject to one’s will. Both of these assumptions are faulty.”
“the driven ADD personality has no idea what his true needs are and must find for them some displaced, symbolic expression.”
“requirement of healing, becoming whole, is circuitry in the brain that can carry different messages and a different, nonhelpless image of the self. There is strong evidence that such circuits can develop at any time in life, as can neural pathways to help the cortex to do its job of inhibition and regulation.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The truth was that for me, as for all addicts, the excitement was not in the ostensible goal—listening to the music—but in the process of acquiring.”
“The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.”
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Book Keywords:
holocaust, healing, adhd, relationships, wellness, psychology
