Depression stems from suppressing emotions in childhood when parents don't acknowledge feelings, the speaker argues. Indigenous parenting kept children close without physical punishment, while European settlers criticized this approach and imposed corporal discipline, forcing kids to hide emotions to stay connected to parents.
Chapters
If you don't see the child, don't accept the child emotion, they're gonna have to repress it. They're gonna have to stuff it. What's another word for stuffing? It's pushing down. Trap it. Yeah. What? Pushing down. What's another word for pushing down? Depressing. Where does depression come from? It's not this disease. Depression comes from having had to push down your emotions. Literally, you had to push down your emotions. In other words, why did you have to push down your emotions to stay connected to your parents? In other words, it was a coping mechanism. And what I'm saying is that a lot of illness, whether of the mind or the body or both, comes from coping mechanisms. They were normal coping mechanisms in response to an abnormal situation. It's not normal for a child to be banished from the peasants of the parent. If you look at indigenous people, they carry their kids everywhere. The kids are always with the parents. And the pilgrims, when they arrived in North America, they're very upset with how the natives reared their children. You know why? Because the indigenous people did not hit their kids.
