#daniel mate

I watched every vlogbrothers video for over a decade

But I just can't handle the hypocrisy.

- “There is an unhealthy kind of guilt: a chronic conviction that we are innately blameworthy and should expect, or even deserve, punishment or reproach. In this dim light our faults and failings become evidence of our irredeemable lowliness rather than invitations to grow and do better. This type of guilt, or the fear of it, often strangles a robust “no,” smothering self-assertion: the prospect of others’ disapproval or disappointment triggers the intolerable conviction that we are bad, wrong, inexcusable.” pg 432

- “Most chronic guilt is obsessively single-minded, knowing only one stimulus and exactly one response.” pg 434

- “Guilt speaks in the voice of tightly coiled implicit memory circuits, making it incapable of and impervious to reason. It can’t help being there, and we cannot get rid of it by force. Even by obeying its dictates we shake it off only temporarily--it is sure to raise its clamor again soon. Our acquiescence, and our trap, derives from the fact that we fear guilt, loathe it, are eager to be rid of it. Yes, I’ll comply, we plead. Anything to make you go away. Recognizing guilt for the well-meaning friend it is--doggedly faithful to a fault--we can make room for it. Engaging it in cordial conversation without believing its self-devaluing message, we realize we are talking to a very young and innocent creature.” pg 434

- “When we give guilt a seat at the table, it no longer needs to ransack the entire house.” pg 435

- “Unless their emotional distress can be shared with and validated by attuned adults, children’s necessary developmental narcissism disposes them to take everything personally. It is natural that they should believe that when bad things happen--when life hurts them, when the environment is stressed, the parents unhappy or ill--it is because they are incapable, unworthy, defective.” pg 436

- “Acknowledging that those on whom one depends are incapable of meeting one’s needs would be a devastating blow to a young person. Thus self-blame, like guilt, is an unflagging protector. Believing that the deficiency is ours gives us at least a modicum of agency and hope: maybe, if we just work hard enough, we can earn the love and care we need.” pg 437

- “When you are no longer looking at things from the perspective of the ‘I,’ you feel a newly released potential and sense of connection.” pg 460

- “Healing is outside the thinking mind’s wheelhouse.” pg 464

- “Society is against essence. Everybody around you, wherever you go, is trying to fill holes, and people feel very threatened if you don’t try to fill yours the same way.” pg 468

- “The point is not the big aha, but the arising--sudden or gradual, however it comes--of the consciousness that holds the mind but doesn’t mistake itself for its contents.” pg 468

- “All addiction is a kind of refugee story: from intolerable feelings incurred through adversity and never processed, and into a state of temporary freedom, even if illusory.” pg 229

- “Like all concepts, mental illness is a construct--a particular frame we have developed to understand a phenomenon and explain what we observe.” pg 239

- “Contrary to what I, too, used to believe, a diagnosis like ADHD or depression or bipolar illness explains nothing. No diagnosis ever does. Diagnoses are abstractions, or summaries sometimes helpful, always incomplete. They are professional shorthand for describing constellations of symptoms a person may report, or of other people’s observations of someone’s behaviour patterns, thoughts, and emotions. For the individual in question, a diagnosis may seem to account for and validate a lifetime of experiences previously too diffuse or nebulous to put one’s finger on. That can be a first and positive step toward healing.” pg 241

- “Diagnoses reveal nothing about the underlying events and dynamics that animate the perceptions and experiences in question.” pg 242 

- “If phenomenon like addiction or mental distress are determined mostly by biological heredity, we are spared from having to look at how our social environment supports, or does not support, the parents of young children, and at how social attitudes, prejudices, and policies burden, stress, and exclude certain segments of the population, thereby increasing their propensity for suffering.” pg 252

- “Perhaps the line between sanity and madness must be drawn relative to the place where we stand. Perhaps it is possible to be, at the same time, mad when viewed from one perspective and sane when viewed from another.” - Richard Bentall pg 253

- “Far from expressing inherited pathology, depression appears as a coping mechanism to alleviate grief and rage and to inhibit behaviours that would invite danger.” pg 256

- “The mind is a meaning-making machine. It will generate stories that “make sense” of the emotions that, at a vulnerable time, it could not contain and perhaps still cannot. Yet in the individual’s unspoken history, the emotions were real, and therefore still are.” pg 257

- “In my experience, the story underneath diagnostic labels is always perfectly coherent if one seeks the truth in the emotional texture and the biographical record rather than in the content of the paranoid fantasy.” pg 257

- “The capacity to recognize safety or threat will evolve in a healthy way under conditions of safety but be disrupted by prolonged early insecurity. Possible outcomes include feeling besieged when there is no threat, or conversely, remaining oblivious to danger when it is present.” pg 259

- “The emergence of new choices in place of old, preprogrammed dynamics is a sure sign of our authentic selves coming back online.” pg 376

- “Agency is the capacity to freely take responsibility for our existence.” pg 377

- “Until we recognize our commonality, we create more woe for ourselves and others: for ourselves, because we increase our distance from our humanity and get caught up in the tense psychological states of judgement and resistance; for others, because we trigger their shame and further isolation.” pg 386

- “Healing, in a sense, is about unlearning the notion that we need to protect ourselves from our own pain.” pg 387

- “Healing, not cure, is the blessing that disease bestowed on these people. Cure can never be guaranteed. Healing is another matter, and it is available until we draw our last breath. It is the movement toward experiencing oneself as a vital whole, whatever may be happening corporeally. Healing is not an endpoint: it is as much a process as disease is.” pg 391

- “These people who get better really change their beliefs about themselves or their beliefs about the universe.” pg 402

- “The aim of healing work is not to shed the personality entirely but to free ourselves from its automatic programming, granting us access to what’s underneath, to reconnect with what’s essential about us.” pg 409

- “To inquire compassionately takes openness, patience, and generosity.” pg 411

- “In compassion there is no exhortation that we should be other than the way we are, only an invitation to inquire into the what, how, and why of the beliefs and behaviours that do not serve us.” pg 411

- “Compassion...is an attitude, not a feeling. Unlike feelings, which come and go of their own accord. attitudes can be invited, generated, and nurtured in the face of any emotional state. The attitude here is one of inexhaustible non-judgement toward whatever one notices.” pg 411

- “Most of us, even the busy ones, have more time than we know what to do with; what we lack is a strong sense of intention for its use.” pg 412

- “Writing by hand rather than typing helps create a sense of connection with yourself.” pg 413

- “Resentment drives you further away because it will contaminate your love for that person.” pg 415

- “Healing cannot occur if we do not accept our worthiness--that we are worth healing.” - Mario Martinez, pg 422

- “While there is inherent value in knowing our stories as stories, what we ultimately want is to unfasten their hold on us.” pg 423

- “Only when attention is present can the mind rewire the brain.” pg 424

- “The quality of your present-moment experience is far more tied to that choice of responses than to anything fixed or preordained in the past.” pg 426

- “The road to hell is not paved with good intentions; it is paved with lack of intention.” pg 429

- “Everything within us, no matter how distressing, exists for a purpose; there is nothing that shouldn’t be there, troublesome and even debilitating though it may be.” pg 431

- “A disease is not like a thing. It is an energy flow, it’s a current; it is evolution or devolution that occurs when you’re not awake and connected, and trauma is essentially ruling your life. I think it’s such a mistake to identify it as a thing, because that makes it hard matter when it’s in fact a much more psychological, spiritual, emotional condition.” - V pg 86-87

- “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not.” - Janos Selye pg 96

- “Repression disarms one’s ability to protect oneself from stress.” pg 100

- “No other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things out to be.” pg 122

- “Our culture too often subordinates felt knowledge to the intellect.” pg 124

- “Emotional rather than intellectual interactions serves as the mind’s primary architects.” pg 126

- “Suppression of innate knowledge is one of medicine’s unfortunate tendencies.” pg 149

- “If it takes a world to raise a child, it takes a toxic culture to make us forget how to.” pg 161

- “The disease paradigm turns a process into a pathology.” pg 215

- “As with most chronic conditions, viewing addiction as a dynamic process to be engaged with rather than a demonic force to be feared or battled can ultimately expand the possibilities for healing.” pg 216

- “Addictions represent, in their onset, the defense of an organism against suffering it does not know how to endure. In other words, we are looking at a natural response to unnatural circumstances, an attempt to soothe the pain of injuries incurred in childhood and stresses sustained in adulthood.” pg 216

- “I have learned that the first question to ask is not what is wrong with an addiction, but what is “right” about it. What benefit is the person deriving from their habit? What does it do for them? What are they getting that they otherwise can’t access?” pg 216

- “When it comes down to it, all addiction’s incentives can be summed up as an escape from the confines of the self, by which I mean the mundane, lived-in experience of being uncomfortable and isolated in one’s own skin.” pg 220