User Profile

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. ADD is not a natural state. It is, to adapt a famous phrase of Sigmund Freud’s, one of civilization’s discontents.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 60)

ALL ADDICTIONS ARE anesthetics. They separate us from the distress in our consciousness. We throw off our familiar and tired consciousness to assume another mind state we find more comfortable, at least temporarily. Desperate to be out of our mind and unaware, we surrender to the addiction, to be lulled into a walking sleep. [..] My route was the compulsive buying of classical records and compact disks, alternating with—or conjointly with—the frenzied purchase of books. On the surface these may seem like innocent and even admirable pastimes—as they would be if undertaken consciously and in moderation. The addict has no such control. The compulsion beckons; the addict runs to serve it. Gradually, in each orgy of buying, I felt myself shrinking into a ghost of myself, full of self-contempt and apologetic for my existence. I have treated heroin addicts, and I recognized in myself the same vacant and driven look I saw in their eyes. [..] The addiction, in a strange way, makes the addict feel more connected to life. The downside is that it separates him further and further from himself. He is feeding only his appetite, not his hunger. [..] It has become evident that the brains of people who are prone to addiction are biologically predisposed by some imbalance of brain chemicals. Narcotic addicts, for example, are thought to suffer from a relative undersupply of endorphins, the brain’s indigenous narcotics. People with ADD seem to be short on dopamine, the reward chemical. [..] While attention deficit disorder cannot be successfully treated as long as the addiction continues to dominate, neither can the addiction be given the appropriate attention if the ADD is ignored and if the common origins of both remain unexplored.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 297 - 304)

As a parent, I have found myself in this situation many times. I have felt the frustrated helplessness of being caught between the urgency to meet some inflexible deadline on the one hand and the recalcitrant immobility of a son or daughter on the other. The temptation is to scream, to take matters physically in hand without regard to the feelings and emotional reactions thus stirred up in the child. I have gone so far as to threaten to drag my child to school in her pajamas, or semidressed and barefoot, if necessary. One can get a child to school on time by such threats and desperation tactics—on time, but frightened, angry and humiliated. Again, at what cost?

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 149)

John Ratey has aptly observed that “I’m sorry” is the most common phrase in the vocabulary of attention deficit disorder. What strikes me immediately when I meet new ADD patients is how often they apologize.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 136)

As many men have proven, mothering—the sensitive nurturing of the child—can be learned when one needs to learn it, or when one decides to do so. [..] Far from being helped, working women are actively penalized if they wish to extend the time they are at home caring for their children. For men, it is not even considered reasonable to think of “interrupting” their careers in order to share in that process. Society does little to establish expert and compassionate day care for those children during whose early years the parent(s), for one reason or another, cannot avoid the necessity of working outside the home. Poor women, especially in the U.S., are economically terrorized by the welfare system into entrusting their infants to appallingly inadequate care situations, and then must spend hours daily traveling to low-paying jobs that barely allow their families a subsistence income.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 111)

Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense—rightly or wrongly—that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.”

Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment.7 Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody.

In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 72)

One is either hopelessly short of time, dashing about like a deaf bat, or else acts as if blessed with the gift of eternity. It’s as if one’s time sense never developed past a stage other people leave behind in early childhood.

[..] Only two units of time exist for the small child: the now and the not-now. The not-now is infinity.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 36)

People with ADD are hypersensitive. That is not a fault or a weakness of theirs, it is how they were born. It is their inborn temperament. That, primarily, is what is hereditary about ADD.

It is sensitivity, not a disorder, that is transmitted through heredity.

Sensitivity is the reason why allergies are more common among ADD children than in the rest of the population.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 59)

IT IS NOT that I wish to be late. I do not imagine for a moment that I will be late. I may have to be somewhere, miles away, at 9:00 a.m., but as long as it is not yet nine, I fully believe I have time enough. I am scheduled to attend ward rounds with nurses and other physicians at Vancouver Hospital. At 8:50 I leap into the shower, still confident: there is space between the big hand of the watch and the hour marker, so I am not late.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 35)

The distractibility fosters chaos. You decide to clean your room, which, typically, looks like a tornado has just passed through. You pick a book off the floor and move to replace it on the shelf. As you do so, you notice that two volumes of poetry by William Carlos Williams are not stacked side by side. Forgetting the debris on the floor, you lift one of the volumes to place it beside its companion. Turning a page, you begin to read a poem. The poem has a classical reference in it, which prompts you to consult your guide to Greek mythology; now you are lost because one reference leads to another. An hour later, your interest in classical mythology exhausted for the moment, you return to your intended task. You are hunting for the missing half of a pair of socks that has gone on furlough, perhaps permanently, when another item of clothing on the floor reminds you that you have laundry to wash before the evening. As you head downstairs, laundry hamper in arm, the telephone rings. Your plan to create order in your room is now doomed.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté

The blitzkrieg method was never again successfully used. The scale and the shape of northern France had provided the perfect board for this exciting game. [..] And yet before we declare PLAN YELLOW to be the only successful blitzkrieg, it is worth looking at the declared objectives of that offensive. One stated aim was to engage and defeat the strongest possible part of the Allied armies. Hitler had specifically ordered the annihilation of the BEF and that it should be prevented from escaping across the Channel. The Germans had failed in that endeavour. It was to prove a fatal flaw.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 327)

On Saturday, 25 May 1940, news reached Gort near Lille that the Germans had captured Calais as well as Boulogne. Reports were arriving at his room in the chateau at Prémesques that the Belgian Army was about to capitulate. The Germans had split the Belgian force and left it isolated from the British, who they must have heard had been evacuating men by sea for several days. For Gort, the Belgian capitulation would mean a 20-mile gap opening up on his left flank. Now came the most important moment in Gort’s career. At about six o’clock in the evening of 25 May, after sitting alone for a long time, he went next door to the office of his chief of staff, General Henry Pownall. Without preliminary discussion, he ordered him to move two British divisions from the south and ‘send them over to Brookie [General Alan Brooke] on the left’. There is no doubt that this decision, which went against his orders from the French, and from London, too, had come after much heart-searching. One of the men who knew him, Major General Sir Edward Spears, described Gort as ‘a simple, straightforward, but not very clever man’ and went on to say he was an ‘overdisciplined soldier who felt above all else that orders must be obeyed’

What Gort called a ‘hunch’ had come within an hour of a gap opening in the Belgian front line. Now it would be a matter of waiting to see whether the Germans could race through it before Gort’s two divisions could get there to plug the hole. For the French, Gort’s decision meant the end of any last hope for a counter-attack southward. For the BEF, it meant a chance of a fighting withdrawal. For Gort, it meant the end of his military aspirations – he would never again command an army in the field.

[..]

Yet if one contemplates what the British government might have been forced by public pressure to do, in coming to terms with a Hitler holding captive a quarter of a million British soldiers, then Gort’s decision was a turning point in the war.

— Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton (Page 306 - 308)

In the early months of 1938, as the US trade negotiations rumbled on, Chamberlain also tried to improve Anglo-Irish relations. Here too, Chamberlain was willing to offer up concessions in the hope of an improvement in atmosphere. Controversially, this included ceding control of the ‘treaty ports’ – three harbours on the western Irish coast from which naval power could be projected far out into the Atlantic, which had been retained by the British after 1921. Since, realistically, they could not have been defended against a hostile hinterland in time of war, Chamberlain thought they were better returned to Irish hands in the hope of friendship in the future. When the prime minister managed to settle the deal himself in direct talks with the Irish taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, it confirmed his faith in the power of personal negotiation.

— Britain's War: Into Battle by Daniel Todman (Britain's War, #1)

‘This is a service, not a trapeze act,’ he used to tell the novices at Beaconsfield. ‘We’re not here for the applause.’

— The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth