Whole Mental Wellness

12/23/2025

12/23/2025

On a Gabor Mate kick currently

Wheew! I stumbled across something today that shifted the ground beneath me in the quietest way.

Gabor Maté was talking with Mel Robbins on her podcast, and he said something so simple it felt dangerous:

"No two children grow up in the same home. Even with the same parents."

I had to stop what I was doing and sit with that.

Because he's absolutely right.

The parent who raised the first child isn't the same person raising the third. By then, they've been reshaped by years, by disappointments, by small victories and accumulated exhaustion. The father might have softened with time or hardened from unmet expectations. The mother might have found her voice or lost it somewhere in the survival of keeping everyone fed and functioning. The marriage that held the first baby might be thriving by the second or unraveling by the third.

And the circumstances? They morph too. The family that struggled when one child was small might be stable when another arrives. Or the reverse. The house that felt full of possibility once might feel heavy with regret later.

Then there's us. The children. We arrive with different temperaments, different sensitivities, different ways of interpreting the exact same gesture. One child feels seen in silence; another feels erased by it. One flourishes under routine; another suffocates. The same embrace means safety to one and obligation to another.

Same roof. Same parents. Completely different childhoods.

This realization made me reconsider every story I've told myself about my family. How I've spent years comparing notes with siblings, arguing about whose memory is accurate, whose experience was valid. But maybe we were all right. Maybe we *were* each raised by different parents because our parents became different people between each of us.

And perhaps the real work of adulthood is making peace with this multiplicity. Forgiving the version of our parents who didn't have it to give. Honoring the version who gave anyway, despite having nothing left. Understanding that the love was genuine even when it wore completely different faces for each of us.

Because love isn't a fixed thing. It's organic, evolving, sometimes depleting, sometimes replenishing. Just like the flawed, beautiful, exhausted people trying their best to offer it.

You can watch that part of the podcast here:

https://youtube.com/shorts/l3NUPuoX5AM?feature

12/23/2025

The doctor keeps asking about stress. Family history. Environmental factors. Lifestyle choices. All the right questions for all the wrong reasons. Because what she's really asking is: what did you do to deserve this? And the answer sitting in that exam room, the one with the autoimmune disorder or the cancer or the mysterious pain that won't quit, that answer isn't doing anything wrong. That's the problem. They're doing everything right. Being helpful. Being kind. Being the person everyone can count on. They just forgot to count themselves.

Gabor Maté's "When the Body Says No" is about that forgetting. About what happens when you spend decades swallowing your anger to keep the peace, ignoring your needs to be loved, saying yes when your whole body is screaming no. The medical establishment calls it random. Genetic lottery. Bad luck. Maté calls it what it is: your body finally speaking the truth you've been too afraid to say out loud. And it's speaking in the only language that will make you listen. Disease.

1. Your emotions don't disappear when suppressed. They migrate into your tissue. Unexpressed anger becomes inflammation. Unprocessed grief becomes an immune system attacking itself. The fear you performed away becomes the tumor growing in the dark. When your mouth goes silent, your body has to scream. Eventually, that scream sounds like disease.

2. Nice people get sick because nice is self-abandonment masquerading as virtue. The woman with lupus who never said no. The man with cancer who spent decades managing others' emotions. We celebrate these people, call them selfless. Maté calls it what it is: people who learned their survival depended on erasing themselves. Their bodies kept receipts for every erasure. Being unable to disappoint others means a lifetime of self-betrayal.

3. Stress is the gap between who you are and who you pretend to be.
It's not the demanding job or difficult marriage. It's feeling fury but showing calm. Wanting to run but forcing yourself to stay. Saying "I'm fine" when you're drowning. That gap between your truth and your performance is where disease grows. The body doesn't care if your life looks good. It only knows whether you're living honestly.

4. The pattern starts when you learn your feelings are dangerous.
A parent who couldn't handle your emotions. Being forced to caregive when you needed care. Learning that anger cost you love. So you became good, easy, the one who didn't make waves. You've been living that lesson in every relationship since, while your body kept score. Now it's presenting the bill.

5. Healing requires becoming who you were taught not to be.
You can't heal by being nicer or managing stress better. You heal by saying no. Expressing anger. Prioritizing your needs even when people call you selfish. If your healing doesn't upset some people, you're not changing the patterns that made you sick. True healing means becoming the person your childhood taught you was too dangerous to be.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4p8g5Cn

You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.

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https://www.facebook.com/share/17C2oUx1eX/?mibextid=wwXIfr

We all want the straight line. Set the goal, achieve the goal. B

ut life doesn’t work like that.

The path is messy, full of doubts, setbacks and failures.

And that’s exactly where the growth is.

The detours are not distractions, they’re the process.

Keep moving.