When the Body Says NO: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté

BATB score: 8/10 🌸

*reader discretion advised* an advanced white paper making a breakthrough point on how the body says ’NO’ to a life spent living for someone else via chronic illnesses

Best to: a sentence from the book that best describe the mood and tone and the premise of the book > “The dynamic interplay between social-conflict events and joint pain describe a homeostatic system in which negative social interaction is regulated through worsening of the disease.”

Best for: if you are okay to read 300 pages of the sentence above

Best as: don’t have kids > “The generations are boxes within boxes: inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my grandfather’s violence, and inside that box, you will find another box with some such black, secret energy - stories within stories, receding in time.”

Best quotes from daughters suffering from mothers:

“I knew boundaries, but my mother did not. That’s what most of our fights were about - about her inability to recognize where she ended and I began.”

“Why can’t parents see their children’s pain?”

“‘My mother or father needed me to be happy’ is the simple formula that trained many a child - later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult - into lifelong patterns of repression.”

“Almost all my accomplishments were in one way or another connected not to my aspirations, but to the aspirations of my mother.”

“Guilt is a signal that you have chosen to do something for yourself.”

“I couldn’t cry all those tears for everybody else, I had to take care of myself. It is important to realize that you have to take care of yourself because you can’t take care of anybody else until you do.”

Best intellectual quotes:

“Repression, the inability to say no and a lack of awareness of one’s anger make it much more likely that a person will find herself in situations where her emotions are unexpressed, her needs are ignored and her gentleness is exploited.”

“Women who were more self-regulated, less emotionally dependent on a relationship that failed to work for them, had stronger immune system. Greater differentiation means better health.”