Gabor Mate on Attachment

"My mother and I barely survived our months in the Budapest ghetto. For a few weeks she had to part from me as the only way of saving me from sure death by starvation or disease. No great powers of imagination are required to understand that in her state of mind, and under the inhuman stresses she was facing daily, my mother was rarely up to the tender smiles and undivided attention a developing infant requires to imprint a sense of security and unconditional love in his mind. My mother, in fact, told me that on many days her despair was such that only the need to care for me motivated her to get up from bed. I learned early that I had to work for attention, to burden my mother as little as possible and that my anxiety and pain were best suppressed.

In healthy mother-infant interactions, the mother is able to nourish without the infant's having in any way to work for what he receives. My mother was unable to provide that unconditional nourishing for me - and since she was neither saintly nor perfect, quite likely she would not have completely succeeded in doing so, even without the horrors that beset our family.

It was under these circumstances that I became my mother's protector - protecting her in the first instance against awareness of my own pain. What began as the automatic defensive coping of the infant soon hardened into a fixed personality pattern that, fifty-one years later, still caused me to hide even my slightest physical discomfort in front of my mother.

Thus, in writing this book, I describe not only what I have learned from others or from professional journals but also what I have observed in myself. The dynamics of repression operate in all of us. We are all self-deniers and self-betrayers to one extent or another, most often in ways we are no more aware of than I was conscious of while 'deciding' to disguise my limp" (from my elderly mother).

From "When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress," Chapter 1


I see in his narrative the dynamics and interaction between a depressed mother and her infant. How both cope and adapt. How this impacts attachment and trust, especially then but also later.

Attachment informs me about how are we taught and trained to matter. As women, or as social workers, or as helping professionals, or as sons/daughters, or as partners/significant others. The (mostly unconscious) responses, messages, interactions, from the people that we care about the most, tell us that we are important - that our voice will make a difference, that we were important from the day we were born, that we are separate and belong, that we can trust our own minds and bodies and that we can trust those charged with the care of our minds and bodies.