When the Body Says No: Mind/Body Unity and the Stress-Disease Connection / Peer Orientation: Why Children Are Stressed, Why Parents and Teachers Are Disempowered and How To Restore a Healthy Balance in Adult-Child Relationships / Compassion Fatigue: Caring for Ourselves while Caring for Others

Please note: this is a private event.

When the Body Says No: Mind/Body Unity and the Stress-Disease Connection
Based on the book When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
(U.S. subtitle: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection)

Stress is ubiquitous these days — it plays a role in the workplace, in the home, and virtually everywhere that people interact. It can take a heavy toll unless it is recognized and managed effectively and insightfully.

Western medicine, in theory and practice, tends to treat mind and body as separate entities. This separation, which has always gone against ancient human wisdom, has now been demonstrated by modern science to be not only artificial, but false. The brain and body systems that process emotions are intimately connected with the hormonal apparatus, the nervous system, and in particular the immune system. Emotional stress, especially of the hidden kind that people are not aware of, undermines immunity, disrupts the body’s physiological milieu and can prepare the ground for disease. There is strong evidence to suggest that in nearly all chronic conditions, from cancer, ALS, or multiple sclerosis to autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease or Alzheimer’s, hidden stress is a major predisposing factor. In an important sense, disease in an individual can be seen as the “end point” of a multigenerational emotional process. If properly understood, these conditions can provide important openings for compassion and self-awareness, which in turn are major tools in
recovery and healing.

Dr. Maté’s presentation includes research findings, compelling and poignant anecdotes from his own extensive experience in family practice and palliative care, and illuminating biographies of famous people such as athlete Lance Armstrong, the late comedienne Gilda Radner, or famed baseball legend Lou Gehrig. The presentation is based on When The Body Says No, a bestselling book that has been translated into more than ten languages on five continents.

Peer Orientation: Why Children Are Stressed, Why Parents and Teachers Are Disempowered and How To Restore a Healthy Balance in Adult-Child Relationships
Based on the book Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers.

Parenting and teaching are much harder these days than they used to be, and than they should be. In Hold On To Your Kids, Dr. Gabor Maté (with developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld) forward a provocative and important view of why this is, and what we can do to counteract it.

The root of the problem is that children no longer look to adults for emotional support, the teaching of values, or the modeling of behavior. Peer orientation refers to the tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction: for their sense of right and wrong, codes of conduct, and their very identity. Peer orientation undermines family cohesion, sabotages healthy development and fosters an aggressive and prematurely sexualized youth culture. For parents already challenged by the demands of our multitasking world and stretched by stark economic realities, peer orientation further complicates the task of child rearing. Children were never meant by nature to be in a position where they are so dominant in influencing one another. This state of affairs may be the norm today, but it’s neither natural nor healthy. Historically it is a very new development, due to economic and social influences prevalent since World War II, resulting in a deep undermining of adult-child connections.

This talk aims at restoring parenting to its natural intuitive basis and the adult-child relationship to its rightful preeminence. The concepts, principles and practical advice articulated will empower parents, teachers and other adults who play a nurturing role to be for children what nature intended: the true source of contact, security and warmth. Parents must regain their natural authority, without coercion, punishment and artificial consequences. Children need to be protected from becoming lost in the emotionally barren and culturally backward world of peer orientation.

Compassion Fatigue: Caring for Ourselves while Caring for Others
Based on the book When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
(U.S. subtitle: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection)

Though compassion fatigue is an oft-used phrase, how accurate is it? Does one truly become fatigued by feeling, expressing, or manifesting compassion? This workshop will explore the deeper source of the well-known phenomenon of burnout, when people engaged in caring for others experience a depletion of their energies, a psychic and physical lassitude. That deeper source, it will be demonstrated, is to be found the personal history of the individual and his or her relationship to the work, not merely in the nature of the work itself. Practices will be taught to prevent what is known as compassion fatigue, and to restore our energies if we have been affected by it.