Let’s keep the @gabormatemd appreciation week going. It is so exciting to see so much enthusiasm for his work: Everyone needs this book. In our conversation this week, we touched on the sometimes dichotomy between authenticity and attachment, how our greatest fear as children is that we will lose our attachment. And it causes us to abandon ourselves. As he writes, “The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel? What happens in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict or profound unhappiness—the stressed induced by society, on children as well as adults. Even with these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient. “Children often receive the message that certain parts of them are acceptable while others are not—a dichotomy that, if internalized, leads ineluctably to a split in one’s sense of self. The statement “Good children don’t yell,” spoken with annoyance, carried an unintended but most effective threat: “Angry children don’t get loved.” Being “nice” (read burying one’s anger) and working to be acceptable to the parent may become a child’s way of survival. Or a child may internalize the idea that “I’m lovable only when I’m doing things well,” setting herself up for a life of perfectionism and rigid role identification, cut off from the vulnerable part of herself that needs to know there is room to fail—or even to just be unspectacularly ordinary—and still get the love she needs.” #gabor #gabormate #bookstagram #books #booktok