Dr. Gabor Maté

You say, I have no idea.

And how many times we've all had the experience of having an inkling of a strong gut feeling, but we're ignoring it.

We're ignoring it and we get into trouble.

Well, that tells us what happened.

What happened was that at some point we found out it was too costly for our attachment relationships to be in touch with our gut feelings.

So then it becomes our first, not our first nature, but our second nature to suppress our feelings, to lose touch with ourselves and to suppress our gut feelings.

And then we pay the cost later on in the form of addictions, mental illness, or any range of physical illnesses.

But it all began with this tragic conflict that children should never be confronted with, but are all the time, between authenticity on the one hand and attachment on the other.

And even as adults, so many people are suffering because they want to be themselves, but they're afraid to be because they know, or at least they fear that if they're themselves, they're going to lose important attachments.

At some point, something has to happen for you that causes you to wonder, who am I really?

And everything that I manifest and speak and do, is it designed to fit other people's expectations or does it line up with who I really am?

Could you say more about that?

Well, it's a great topic and I think in this culture it's a fundamental one.

There's a wonderful Catholic monk and mystic called Thomas Merton who talked about how we live in other people's minds.

So when we're concerned about what other people think of us, how they see us, perceive us, judge us, love us, hate us, we're not living in ourselves, we're living in other people's minds.

So where does that come from?

One of the needs of the human child, it's an essential need.

Just as we have the need to be held physically, to be fed, to be nurtured, we also have the need to be seen.

Because we get to see ourselves the way others see us.

When the parents can't see the child in the child's essence, in the child's... Well, the great psychiatrist and co-writer with Oprah, Bruce Perry, has written a book called Born for Love.