Disconnection in all its guises — alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation — is becoming our culture's most plentiful product. No won… - Gabor Maté

From early infancy, it appears that our ability to regulate emotional states depends upon the experience of feeling that a significant person in our life is simultaneously experiencing a similar state of mind.

As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates. (p298)

Time after time it was the “nice” people, the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness in my family practice, or who came under my care at the hospital palliative ward I directed.