The Coat I Wore Too Long

I was a child who learned to read a room,
to hear a door and know which way to turn.
I made myself small enough for the gloom,
and called it love, because I had to learn.
Nobody struck a match, no headline came,
no siren marked the night my trust grew thin.
The wound was quiet, it never took a name —
it did not happen to me, but within.
So I grew clever in the art of gone:
I turned the world to static, soft and gray.
When I could not fight back, I carried on
by leaving while my body had to stay.
That trick was meant to last a single year,
a borrowed coat to wear until the spring.
But coats grow into skin when worn in fear,
and what began a state became a thing.
They cut the mind from body in their books,
and filed my aching under nothing found.
But flesh remembers everything it took,
and hearts keep time with every slamming sound.
One shout, one raised hand — watch how fast I change:
the stomach stops, the blood runs to the hand.
And know this runs all day, quiet and strange,
in rooms no careful doctor understands.
I used to think my troubles came by chance,
a run of weather, luck that wouldn’t hold.
But every wall was there to break the trance,
and every ache was something being told.
The part of me that loved me most of all
had built those roadblocks so that I would see.
It did not come to watch me rise or fall —
it came to walk me back, at last, to me.
So if you read this wearing borrowed walls,
know nothing in you broke that can’t be known.
The coping kept you breathing through the halls —
you may set it down now. You are not alone.
…
DCG

In the realm of child development, I just wish we’d actually looked at the evidence. But we don’t.
I was in family practice for 32 years — 12 of them with hardcore drug addicts, the other 20 in a straightforward family practice. And in those years I found that the people who got sick and didn’t get sick had certain patterns.
There’s one major source of illness, and I’m talking about any kind of illness, whether that’s so-called mental illness or physical illness. And that’s childhood trauma. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. And things can happen inside you for which you don’t need very dramatic events.

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development — because of scarcity, stress, or instability — can lead to short-term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity.
Because those early coping patterns — here’s the problem with them: they’re meant to be temporary states. If you’re familiar with my idea about ADHD, which I’ve been diagnosed with, it’s a coping mechanism of young infants. When there’s stress around them and they can’t escape, fight back, or change the situation, they tune out as a way of coping. But then it gets wired into the brain, and now it goes from a temporary state, which it’s meant to be, to a long-term trait.
There’s nothing wrong with her coping that way if she could drop it once she no longer needed to be that way. But of course, that’s not how it works. These coping mechanisms are unconscious. Therefore they’re not chosen deliberately, therefore they cannot be released deliberately either. We’re not even aware of them.
The reason these patterns make you ill is because it turns out that, as traditional medicinal practices have always known, you can’t actually separate the mind from the body. Except in medical school. But not in real life.

Now, Western medicine looks at disease from a particular perspective. And you have to understand something about medicine. It’s science, alright, but it’s also ideology. Now, there’s a difference between science and ideology. An ideology is a worldview that you’re not conscious of, where you have hidden beliefs that you don’t question. And that exists in all realms — whether it’s science, or politics, or history, or economics, or any field of human thought or investigation. So there’s always ideological biases hidden in any system.

Now, what are the biases of Western medicine? Well, the hidden biases are, number one, that diseases have either physical causes in the sense of genes, or external forces like bacteria or viruses or toxins — or the disease is what we call idiopathic, we don’t know what the cause of it is.
The first bias is that causes are purely physical. The second bias is that diseases happen to organs. So you have heart disease, and you have lung disease, and you have diseases of connective tissue or the liver or whatever. And then there are specialties designated to study in depth the diseases of these organs. So we separate the organ from the whole person.
We might acknowledge the role of the physical environment, but we certainly don’t acknowledge the role of the social environment. So, I could clearly and trivially change your physiology in a split second. I simply would have to utter a piercing, blood-curdling scream and brandish a weapon at you. And your physiology would change like that. Your hormonal glands would start behaving differently, your intestines would stop digesting, more blood would flow to your muscles, and you’d be ready for flight or fight.

Now that’s an obvious example where the emotion changes the physiology in a split second. Well, guess what — that goes on 24/7. So that interaction between the physiology and the emotions is constant. It’s just that for the most part we’re not aware of it unless it’s dramatic.
In general, the role of the emotions is to invite in what is nurturing and welcome and healthy, and to keep out that which is unwelcome, dangerous, and toxic. So with some people, some of the time, we will invite even greater proximity. And others, we would never want to be anywhere close to them. That’s the job of our emotions — to maintain those boundaries.
Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They’re specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself.
We can look at psychological problems, relationship conflicts, and illness as just problems to get rid of. Or we could look upon them as opportunities for learning and development and growth. You don’t say to somebody just diagnosed with cancer, “Hey, great, this is a great teaching moment.” But if somebody wants to learn, if they start asking why, it’s a powerful teacher.
And contrary to what my profession believes — that these diseases have a life of their own, separate from the individual — they don’t. They’re processes inside people, and the people have the response-ability to affect those processes once they get it and they drop the automatic patterns that have been driving them.

—Dr. Gabor Mate

The physiological roots of illness

Sustainable human