There’s a Canadian physician and author, Dr. Maté, who has done a ton of work on addiction, parenting, trauma and how human disease might be related to an individual’s connection or lack of connection with four main areas of alienation.
If you are alienated from these areas in your life, he supposes, bad things happen. That’s terribly reductive because this is a short podcast, but we’re trying to quickly give you a sense of what this man writes about because it’s super interesting and we see so many of our friends suffering right now.
At a speech at the 2012 National Bioneers Conference, Maté referenced Karl Marx’s areas of alienation. Yes, that Karl Marx. And Maté tweaked them a bit to serve his own purposes.
Those areas of alienation are:
Nature
Other people
Work
Our own self
These are all the things that hurt us, he supposes, if we aren’t connected to them.
Nature is pretty self-evident, right? So, we don’t have to go into that much here. But the more distant we are from nature, the more it hurts us. We actively hurt nature all the time, which means we are also actively hurting our own selves.
Maté says, “The second alienation is from other people, and that means we have less contact, we have less intimacy, we have less trust, we have less of a sense of relationship and that of course leads to increased capacity to illness (physical and mental).”
Alienation from our work is just as big a deal. If we don’t have meaningful work that gives us a sense of purpose, when our work isn’t creative or isn’t part or who we are, then he writes, “that imposes depression, anxiety and a sense of meaninglessness. And when we have a sense of meaninglessness, we will want to substitute that sense of meaninglessness—or that sense of meaning that we’ve lost—by all kinds of other activities.
This is where we become obsessed with the perfect pose, capture on Instagram, the likes we gather on TikTok, obsessed with how much we can own, other people’s reactions to us, our external successes.
And it’s all bunk.
“And of course what this society does,” Maté says, “it sells us a lot of products that substitute for that loss of meaning. In fact, much of the economy is based on a loss of meaning in our culture.”
Finally, he comes to the alienation from our self.
He talks about ignoring our gut feelings and our good feelings, supposing that we have lost who we are.
“No infant is born without gut feelings. Infants are totally connected to their gut feelings,” he says. “And that means that in this culture something very powerful happens to alienate you from your true self because the world couldn’t stand who you really were and your parents were too stressed themselves to honor and recognize who you really were.”
When you separate from your self, he believes you no longer know what truth is, or who you are.
Maté has his definite enemies and naysayers because he believes that addictions come from childhood abuse. Others think this is overly simplistic.
The first five years of live, he believes are the most important. And he thinks that if we lack enough ability to process neurochemicals then we become people who self-medicate. Other people like Dr. Stanton Peele adamantly disagree. And believe that’s reductionist and “highly conjectural.” Not all addicts had traumatic childhoods. Not everyone with a traumatic childhood becomes addicted.
That’s all fine and good and important. Debate is a good thing. So are differing opinions!
What interests us is this belief of alienation as a problem with far reaching impacts, of how we as a culture are actually pushing that abandonment for those five areas because we are so materialistic, so toxic, so broken.
Alienation. Abandonment. Particularly after COVID19 so many of us are feeling those things and the question becomes: How do we get back to who we are? How do we feel purpose? Feel closer to nature? Closer to community? Closer to ourselves? How do we make our lives and our work meaningful?
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Dude. Dogs are just real. They wag when they are happy, whine when sad. Growl when mad. Be a dog. Be real. Connect to who you are. Just don’t poop on the floor.
LINK REFERENCED IN OUR RANDOM THOUGHT ABOUT ELVIS AND CHAPELS
https://apnews.com/article/las-vegas-elvis-presley-d58cb1aa18d5b2c99a77e48f77e2044e
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we have a new writer podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
No More Elvis and the Cost of Alienation